>> Since someone else started the 'lightweight' distro theme. I feel
>> justified in adding my plug for Puppy Linux. I run it on an X30 and it
>> is really snappy.
>>
>
>
> How much of the hardware was detected?
>
much of it I haven't tried to use so cannot say:
IrDa:?
Compact Flash slot :?
modem: ?
mini firewire: works if you load the modules yourself
Bluetooth: don't have
wireless: my secondhand unit came with an ipw2200 chipset which works
fine with WEP (WPA don't know), but I don't think that is the default
chipset. Generally Puppy's wireless support is pretty good. Barry takes
a fairly pragmatic view of irritating bits of proprietary firmware (and
multimedia codecs) and includes them in the iso which makes life much
easier.
audio including sockets and buttons work out of the box.
X, works great in 3.01. 4.00 requires that you use Xvesa or the generic
xorg vesa driver
VGA out works out of the box for cloned screens using xorg, I toyed
briefly with separate displays but didn't succeed.
USB: out of the box, though I've had mixed results with USB serial
devices (gpsd won't talk to my garmin gps)
>
>> There are obviously compromises involved in using such a non-standard
>> distro but if it works for the tasks you want then the performance is
>> excellent.
>>
>
>
> What are the compromises other than a lack of depth with the software thats
> installed?
>
There is actually a lot of software that is not in the official
repository, ask on the forum and someone can generally point you at what
you want.
You are running as root. This is an issue for some people but there is
an excellent analysis of the real risk on a single user machine here [1].
The user base for some of the applications is not that high. You have to
be prepared to roll your sleeves up and get involved in solving problems
you encounter. Though the forum is very friendly and responsive in
assisting with debugging.
You may find yourself losing valuable coffee making / staring out the
window time because everything starts up so fast. I now find other OSs
on much faster hardware exceedingly irritating. Everything is fast. I
can download the iso in less than 4 minutes. It takes even less than
that to manually unpack it into a 'frugal' install consisting of 4
files, add a grub entry, reboot, select a keyboard layout and X config
and I'm on the desktop.
[1]
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=199344#199344
--
Will Davies
