Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> On 01/06/2009 21:20, Sean Gibbins wrote:
>> Martin A. Brooks wrote:
>>
>>> I'm practical and pragmatic mostly, so I went back to the OS it shipped
>>> with. Hey ho.
>>>
>>
>> Try Pupeee or Puppy - both are pretty painless in terms of the download
>> and quite refreshing in terms of the approach.
>>
>
> Call me lazy and unadventurous, but these days I simply can't be
> bothered with a Linux distro that isn't Debian, or very closely
> related to Debian. In practical terms this means *buntu on desktops
> and Debian on servers.
>
>
Fair enough Martin.
We use Ubuntu almost exclusively here, and I am all but done with
playing around with other distros now, since they are all much of a
muchness.
However, I came across Puppy when I wanted something lightweight that
would run off of a 2 GB USB stick to by-pass my work laptop's fully
encrypted hard drive and make use of the rest of the hardware for
personal use (ripping my vinyl albums for the most part).
I found it to be quite innovative in its approach and it remains my
USB-stick distro of choice despite having tried the various
Ubuntu/Mint/CrunchBang USB efforts created from the live disks since
then. One thing I like is that it is optimised to run in memory and make
as few writes to disk as it can, and also the ease with which the whole
USB drive install can be made to sit within an encrypted file.
I have used it to boot several other machines for maintenance so its
usefulness also extends beyond its original brief, as it were.
The downside is that you run as root, but then it was only ever intended
to be used in single-user mode. Also, it is a lightweight distro
designed for speed and a small memory footprint on older kit, so many of
the chunkier 'standard' applications found on regular distros are absent
on the base install. That said it absolutely flies on a dual-core laptop
with 2GB RAM!
Sean
--
www.funkygibbins.me.uk
