Am i wasting my time, or is Puppy easy to use once installed

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alsy · #1 Post by **alsy** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 05:16

Would like to get an opinion from experienced Linux users to help me decide on weather to continue my efforts with Puppy.

I wish to migrate from Microsoft to Linux. (Eventually, but sooner is better) I have tried several Linux over the past 12 months. Mostly live CDs, but have installed some to a spare removable hard disk with a few partitions. Installation seems fairly easy with Linux, and even easier than XP in some ways. However, the main gripe or my main resistance is the level of technical aptitude required in order to get some little thing working/ sorted (which is a big thing if its not working) which can usually be found by way of exploration of menus and mouse clicks in a Windows environment. To cut this short, I have issues with using command line/ terminals. I don’t want to get a bachelor degree in medicine in order to heal a small cut on my hand.
I tried the earlier version of puppy, very early 2006, and I loved the speed. I was not too bothered by its ugliness. However, I had some message which I don’t recall exactly. It basically told me I a driver was missing when I tried to get the internet connection going. I did not understand the messages and tried different ways, and got into the driver section and all of that. Aarrrgggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Geek city. (No offence intended to anyone. We all contribute in our own unique way with our abilities) Get me out of here Pleeeezzzzzzee. So, I left that. Recently, I read a claim that Puppy 2.12 “just works

#2 Post by MU » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 05:41

It depends on the driver-sitution for your specific computer.

First:
with the new Kernel, the situation has dramatacally improved this year.
I've read several feedbacks meanwhile that say they find Puppy easier to use than Windows XP.

But to be honest:
not every device is supported.
If a device will not work, we will try to find a easy to use solution.
But as we usually don't have that device ourselves, we must torture you with typing some consolecommands or editing some files.
The results we get then, help us to create a wizard, that will help others in future.

So at least you know, that your efforts will help others

In the past, I also was sent some hardware or a donation to buy a specific product, what made it easier to add support for it.
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HardwareTesting

Mark

#3 Post by MU » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 05:48

Another issue are "dependencies".
If you install a dotpup like a game, it might require other dotpups.

So it might be a good idea, to use a "puplet", that is a CD based on Puppy, but with some addons.

They include the most common libraries.

Your machine is very modern, so you could use one of the bigger ones like rudy , edu-puppy or muppy.
The current Muppy has some bugs, I hope I can upload version 006 on sunday (it includes bugfixes).

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=12458
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=12963
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=10779

Mark

Lobster · #4 Post by **Lobster** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 06:05

I would really appreciate an honest answer, and if you are really able to see/feel / understand this from a newbie’s perspective of simplicity, it would be much appreciated. (Rather than seeing through the eyes of a seasoned Linux user who may have a inclination to higher level of technical adoption than I wish to commit too. – Everything is easy once you know how, but not everyone wants to go that path when there is a far easier one)

I would say Puppy is not ready for you. Some programs you can just use. You will still need to put in some effort. I would wait for PuppyPro (currently in Beta). Even that may require effort that you might like to spend elsewhere.

I am unaware of a perfect operating system. If you find one let us know.

You might like to spend a day training / playing Sunday 3 Dec 2006
http://tmxxine.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=PuppyLove

alsy · #5 Post by **alsy** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 06:19

I think i need to re phrase the problem i mentioned with the CD. I realise now, that my explanation was not proper.

I burned the Puppy 2.12 onto a CD. Puppy will not boot up from the CD. (no problem booting one of my other Live Linux CD's such as PCLinux OS)

One other thing i would like to mention. I apologize if my posting has a compaining tone to it. I could have made the posting shorter and a bit more direct. eg Is there any CLI involved witht he new puppy 2.12 ... etc
I Just read "Linux is not Windows" (It was an indirect link from the newbies/ tutorial sort of area) Very interesting to see someone elses perspective. very well written, and i understand his point. It has made me at least consider trying to use some commmand line if it does not require spending my life on it. I dont know if this will happens, but at least a consideration. I say this after finding through one of the links here, a CLI list which helps simplify it.

Thanks for you efforts.

#6 Post by **Pizzasgood** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 06:52

A little CLI here and there will probably be needed if you want to do something Puppy doesn't have by default. But, it's mostly very simple things, such as "copy this into the terminal and hit enter". For example, somone might ask you to post the result of df -h or lsmod. Or you might need to type modprobe ndiswrapper. It's very unlikely that someone would expect you to type in, with no example, something like, say,
for i in *.tar.gz;do tar -zxf $i;rm $i;done;echo;echo "Finished"
Also, there are quite a few wizards that automate things, and there seem to be more every day. You'll probably use the CLI more for debugging purposes than installation. Not that things are especially buggy.

Driver-wise, the zdrv add-on should help out even more, especially as Barry works his magic on it over a couple versions.

Sound will likely work out of the box, but it may take a little work if not. Probably not a lot. I used to have to install a driver for my sound, and it consisted of extracting the package, running it from the terminal, clicking 'yes' a couple times, and dancing to the music. I googled for the driver myself, but someone in the forum probably could have pointed me in the right direction. Now Puppy "just works" with it though, so I don't have to.

I also used to manually install drivers for my video card. Now I use a different card (ATI), and MU's 3DCC package works great at doing it itself.

In my opinion, 2.12 is the closest to "just working" that I've used. In fact, I think it includes the driver for my mom's wireless network. I need to remember to take a disk with me next weekend so I can try it.

So if I were you, I'd just give it a shot and see. No obligation, a complete refund of all $0.00, and you get to keep the CD. We're that sure it will maybe work!

Speaking of the CD, I don't know what the problem is. Maybe it's a bad burn?

Incidentally, today I got my Saitek P880 gamepad working, and used it to play FFT in ePSX. I just loaded a couple drivers Puppy already had and installed a plugin for ePSX. Way easier than I expected it to be.

alsy · #7 Post by **alsy** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 08:23

In the attempt to burn puppy again onto the same CD, an error message warned me that if burning proceeds, the format is not recognised. (i dont recall exactly, but something along those lines) I burned Puppy onto a new CD, and it booted up OK. The puppy that would not boot was burnt onto a cd that had a small amount of data burnt onto it allready, so i asume that that at least on my system, burning puppy needs to be on a fresh CD in order to work..
I am typing from the Puppy live boot at this time.

Lobster · #8 Post by **Lobster** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 08:34

alsy wrote:I am typing from the Puppy live boot at this time.

that is good news

Getting used to any OS takes a little while.
There is a lot in Puppy. It is great fun finding that stuff and using it.
Most of the major things just work - the rest we (well the developers) are working on

#9 Post by **Flash** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 13:13

As to the subject line of your original post, why install Puppy to the hard drive at all? Puppy is so small that it boots fast even from a live CD. I find it very simple to run from multisession DVD, especially when it comes time to upgrade to the latest Puppy, which happens about once a month.

Booting takes longer as the DVD fills up with sessions, but the wait is still not too long even with 100 sessions on the DVD. There are several advantages running from multisession DVD has several advantages over installing to hard drive:

1. The disk is the backup.
2. Complete security simply by removing the disk.
3. Archiving for forensic purposes. (Nothing is erased or overwritten as the disk fills up.)

PaulBx1 · #10 Post by **PaulBx1** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 16:20

Stick with LiveCD. Copy your pup_212.sfs file to the top of your hard drive so it boots fast.

As to your other concerns, try to be open minded about the command line. The information is out there, just google for man pages and such; most of the time people just tell you what to type. You don't have to learn every flag or switch for every command, that is impossible. You just dig for the one you need, use it, throw it in a script somewhere, and then forget about it. Is that so hard? You do not have to learn to be a doctor to fix a scratch, but you might have to spend a minute to read the label on the tube of salve before using it.

I can assure you, I have spent gobs of time googling around the internet for Windows stuff too. In that case it was making sure my virus checker subscription was paid up, running various spyware removers, and looking at the various programs that managed to install themselves and run at boot, trying to decide if I should get rid of them, or if deleting something would break something, or digging into the registry (ugh). Linux is far from perfect, but at least you don't feel you are constantly being assaulted by vile strangers.

I still run Windows on occasion; some things that I use infrequently would not be "cost-effective" to get running on Linux. But I sure don't use it to get on the Internet any more. That looks like masochism to me, these days.

dewdrop · #11 Post by **dewdrop** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 17:00

Hi alsy,

I think that Puppy is easiest when used as a live CD.

I have Ubuntu 6.10 installed on the hard drive (an ATA drive - I mention this because I note in your original post you indicate that you have a 160GB SATA drive), and when I want to use Puppy to try out a new version, or whatever, I simply put the CD in the drive and hit the restart button, and I'm in Puppy version "whatever".

I suppose you could say that I still consider Puppy to be experimental, and that's true, I do. But when I want to have fun and try to learn something about Linux, or Puppy, I "fire up" some version of Puppy, and away I go.

Over the past year or so, I have had many trials with Puppy, some I've won - thanks to the help I've received on this Forum - and some I've lost....most are not due to Puppy, but to either a strange piece of hardware, my reluctance to learn something new, non-understanding of some concept of Linux, or not knowing how to ask a question in a manner that one of the others on the Forum can answer .

My bottom line with Puppy is this: I don't get angry when using Puppy because I can't figure something out, I try to maintain a "learners" attitude (I don't know why I need to know this, but I'll try learn about it anyway - maybe the "why" will be answered after I learn how).

My .02 cents.

dewdrop

veronicathecow · #12 Post by **veronicathecow** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 17:45

Hi, Alsy glad you found Puppy

I've had Twenty years with Windows from 3.1 onwards (I.T. Technician).

About 6 years ago I tried to move to Linux but it simply was not ready.

I have tried Ubuntu (big and slow but lots of stuff but difficult to play with),

SUSE, very good but just tried OpenSUSE10.2 RC1 and it trashed my partitions! In the past I would have always recommended it. It has great hardware detection and large package range and you can play with it easily.

Freespire, nothing special,

DSL, little too hard,

Fedora Core 3 and 4 both trashed my machine, havn't tried any other cores since then.

Muppy shows great promise but still rather buggy but I will definitly be keeping my eye on that one.

I wanted to do a HDD install and tried at least 6 versions of Puppy upto 2.11 and every one failed! (Live from CD was fine. They found some install script bugs that they sorted)

I nearly gave up but 2.12 seamonkey HDD install is brilliant. The speed fantastic and it seems very stable especially if you stick with default packages. Beware of NTFS support I had some problems with it and it may have wiped all my data off a drive. Stick to ext3.

Puppy is not perfect but it is really usable. Internet, mail, DVDs , USB drives straight from the packet...

I've done a lot of fiddling but I've settled for Puppy 2.12 and maybe another distro for things Puppy does not have (But rarely used) In fact it is likely that the other distro will be a puppy variant with WINE etc

Also forum members are very helpful

Hope this helps
Tony

singlewc · #13 Post by **singlewc** » Sat 02 Dec 2006, 21:20

I am not an experienced linux user. I am an experienced linux "tryer" and "giver upper" for at least a half dozen years tho

Many distros, same issues, much dissapointment. However, puppy seems to have found a way onto my computer, and it looks like a keeper to me.

I spent 14 years on IBM OS/2, and of course, became a windows expert because it always required a ton of instal, reinstall/redo/fix/update/etc

I have no intention of instantly bailing on what I presently use, but Puppy gets booted when Ihave normal things to do on the PC, rather than win2K. Its fast, it provides simple mount and monitor facilities, and once I copied the big pup file from the CD, the root drive I keep puppy stuff on, ....wow.... its booted and ready to go from the CD, in under 30 secs.....

Now, someone point me to a way to use Puppy as the host, and run Win2K in a guest VM, and I am there!

I still have lots of issues with it, and I expect that, but it seems that there is more community here than with some of the more mainstream distros, and more willingness to teach, as opposed to just telling me what to type.

It may take a while before I can say puppy is all that I use, but this is the most time, effort, and enjoyment I have gotten from linux, ever. I recommend that you use the CD boot, save stuff on your HD, copy that pup file to speed things up, and proceed at your own pace to move over to puppy nearly full time.

Tons of time spent learning other OS's, means it will take time to relearn to do things the linux way:-) As with all things, I learn better when its because I want to, and I can see the benefit, and so far, puppy seems worth the effort.

Good luck.

John

EdFromHouston · #14 Post by **EdFromHouston** » Sun 03 Dec 2006, 01:20

I like learning linux with Puppy because I can totally mess it up running the live version by doing everything wrong, wrong commands, wrong files in whatever, deleting the wrong file, even purposely installing viruses or mailware just to see what happens, then all I have to do is reboot without saving to start learning again without damage to my system.

The live CD is the perfect learning tool.

marksouth2000 · #15 Post by **marksouth2000** » Sun 03 Dec 2006, 10:07

The key question one needs to ask oneself is:

"Do I want to be a newbie forever?"

paulh177 · #16 Post by **paulh177** » Sun 03 Dec 2006, 11:24

I've been puppy-dabbling for a short time, and I have two observations:
1. Sometimes the journey is as much fun as what you do at the destination
2. I'm pretty competent with computers and operating systems --I used to "do" them for a living; but when I really need MS XP support, I find it hard to get anything useful anywhere on the web. I've asked a few questions here about installing & running puppy in the past couple of months and got immediate, helpful, knowledgable and above all courteous responses. Which is much more than can be said for any of the other forums I have frequented.

Ganymedes · #17 Post by **Ganymedes** » Sun 03 Dec 2006, 11:48

It is also a matter of perspective.

There was an article about this a couple of years ago when they tried to install both Windows XP and Linux on a new computer. To put it short, there were small problems with Linux - nothing that a newbie could not easily sort out. But with Windows there were problems which prevented the installation for a newbie. So Windows XP turned turned out to be completely unsuitable for an inexperienced user. They hoped that within a couple of years a better version of Windows might come out.

- well, we have been waiting that for more than 10 years now.

That article did not even mention some very big problems for a newbie that Windows has - because of its bad design. When you connect a fresh Windows computer to the (regular home) network, it will immediately began to be attacked by worms. How can you EVER load those 50 patches to Windows, because in order to download them you have to connect to the network. Also all your possible virus scanners and firewalls are out of date in a fresh computer. To get them to actually do something you need to connect to a network. I mean - you can do all this, but a new user to Windows has no change of surviving (well, in a protected network he could do this).

Also, within a few months your Windows computer WILL be full of spyware which will slow down the computer until it stops completely. Well, you can deal with that if you buy extra software and know what you are doing. Which is not THAT easy, if you do not understand these matters.

These were not theorethical examples - both of these happened to my neighboor - a newbie Windows XP user.

The biggest difference, I think, is that people know about the problems in Windows and can thus - in a way or the other - survive them. One normal way is to reinstall it every year ... hehe, that seems to happen quite often anyhow. But with Linux, generally speaking, the problems are not known.

So a Forum like this and instructions which are really written to help people, can make the difference for a Linux distro. With Puppy, all this seems to be quite good.

Dougal · #18 Post by **Dougal** » Sun 03 Dec 2006, 14:07

Alsy: please note that whenever you burn a ISO file you need to do so on a "clean" cd.
A ISO is a "cd image", so when you burn it you don't use "make data disk""add files", but "burn cd image""select file".
If you use the "data disk" option you'll just be adding the ISO to the cd as a file, so it won't get booted.

mbutts · #19 Post by **mbutts** » Mon 04 Dec 2006, 01:52

while im not a long time expert on linux, i have been around computers since the late 70's. starting with dos, win 3.11, 95, 95se, beta 98, 98, me, and both home and pro xp unix, and mac os. ive also dabbled with assembler, binary and a few other now obscure languages. can u say punch cards? anyway, as far as linux, i played with redhat, mandrake, knoppix, ubuntu, xbuntu, slax, dsl, and puppy. back in the late 90's i gave up on finding a good distro of linux. they required way too much tuning. in the last couple years i have revisited looking for a good distro. i have recently been looking at live cds. to date, i like puppy the best. maybe with slax as a distant second for being easy to get up and running. im still trying to learn how live cds work. its not quite as easy as just plain ole meat and potatoes hd instal. least for me it isnt. man talk about coming a long ways..... i can remember worrying about too many bytes years ago with programming, now i worry about cd, cdrw and dvd......which should i use today.....im still a noobie with how live linux works but from what ive learned over the years about other os's id say puppy and some of the other live cds are on the verge of being VERY user friendly. i give puppy a thumbs up. btw, i shyed away from puppy for a long time because i didnt think anything named puppy could be powerful or user friendly. when i finally tried it, i liked it right off the bat. the more i use it, the more i become familliar with it the more i think it is user friendly. especially since u can download help videos or go to the forum and ask for help. one last thing, when i updated from windows 3.11 to 95 i so disliked 95 i reinstalled 3.11 for a while. well needless to say i eventually moved on to bigger things... notice i didnt say better..... thats why im wanting to switch to linux... (better) linux is kind of like women, theres lots of versions out there, and not everyone has the same taste in women. lucky for us men too cuz women dont have the same tastes... so some of us poor fools might still have a chance.... least thats my 2 cents on puppy.... hope this helps

Tabasc0 · #20 Post by **Tabasc0** » Wed 03 Jan 2007, 12:56

I'm definitely no computer expert but I have to say Puppy has re-sparked my interest in getting to know my PC again.

I remember back in the day when the Commodore 64 ruled the world and every kid tried to make their own games on it using BASIC! I remember helping my friend type out this adventure game program in BASIC from a computer magazine. Back then, it was fun trying out new things on your computer. Heck, I was stoked when the LOGO animation worked on the old Aplle IIe!! Things (and PCs) were much simplier then...

Then things got complicated...and I think it happened roughly when Windows came about (I could be wrong..just my 2 cents). People (and I mean ordinary people) were scared to try out things for fear of breaking their PC. Believe me, it wasn't hard. The amount of times I've seen the 'Blue Screen of Death' from Windows 95 onwards. Sometimes due to some 'experiment' I did, other times Windows just felt like it! lol...

At the moment, I know my way around a PC insofar as installing the OS (Windows and a few Linux distros) setting up the internet, configuring hardware and such. Just enough to get by. Puppy is the only distro I tried so far that actually encourages me to learn more about PCs and Linux. The main factor is obviously the way its built. As somebody mentioned before, being a 'Live CD' I can actually try out stuff on it and not be too afraid of trashing my PC (knock on wood). If I stuff up, I just press reset and start again

I don't have to reinstall everything like in Windows or the other HD install Linux distros. In my brief experience with Linux in general, Puppy has given me the least hassle in terms of getting everything on my PC to work and I credit that to the AWESOME people here in the forums!! For some reason, I never feel frustrated when I come across an obstacle in Puppy. The people here are excellent, especially to us newbies

So, to answer your question alsy, Puppy is definitely 'easy' to use. Maybe not in the same capacity as WinXp but unless you use a very exotic WinXp only program/hardware I'm sure you can find an equivalent of it in Puppy (or Linux in general). You may need to use CLI every now and then just to make something work but its nothing to get worried about (most people here are more than happy to go through things step by step if need be). Isn't that part of the fun? lol..and like I said before, if you stuff up, press reset and start again

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum