Looking for a way to breathe new life into that old laptop of yours? Puppy Linux might be what you’re looking for. Puppy Linux is a super light-weight distribution of Linux that’s designed to be booted from a CD or a USB key and runs entirely in your system’s RAM. According to their website, their goal is to make computing “Fast and Easy”. I put this claim to the test on my Toshiba NB205 netbook, grading it on four criteria:
- Ease of installation
- Appearance
- Usability
- Availability and Variety of applications
Let’s see how it rated…
Installation
Fast and Easy. It’s fast and it’s easy because there is no installation. As the Puppy Linux installation guide says:
Puppy is easy to use and does not require a hard disk, so the first trick that you must know is how NOT to install it to hard disk !
All I had to do was:
- round up a spare USB key
- download the latest ISO from the Puppy Linux site (a weighty 100MB!)
- use UNetbootin to load Puppy onto the USB key
After that, just reboot using the USB drive as the boot device and you’re on your way.
Appearance
Puppy Linux Desktop
Meh. I guess one can’t expect too much visually from such a compact distribution of Linux. After all, the goal is speed and usability, not visual appeal. The first time I booted into Puppy Linux, I was greeted with a desktop full of big, colorful icons for the most used functions, such as web browsing, email, file browser, etc. This gives the desktop a fun and easy appearance, if not necessarily good-looking. Openbox is the default window manager, which comes loaded with a bland, utilitarian looking theme. This, of course, can be changed to something more slick. Either way, Puppy Linux doesn’t really have the same stylish, cohesive look that something more bloated and sophisticated like Ubuntu has.
Usability
Not bad at all. It’s difficult for a long-time Linux nerd like myself to judge usability objectively. That being said, I found Puppy Linux to be breeze to set up and begin using. Thus far, using it hasn’t required a single visit to the ol’ command line. Everything is pretty easily browsable, launchable and configurable from either the desktop shortcuts or the main menu. Also not to be overlooked is that Puppy Linux will play all of your music and videos right from the first boot without having to install any extra software. Combine that with its big, colorful and user-friendly interface, and you get a fairly pleasant usability experience.
Granted, there is a bit of a learning curve. Installing applications, although fairly easy and painless, does require the user to select which version of a given app they want to download and install, and also from which mirror. For example, if I want to install the GIMP Image editor from the “Quickpet” application installer (their more user friendly package installer), which version do I want?
- gimp_full-2.6.22-i486-squeeze.pet
- Gimp-2.6.10-lucid.pet
- Gimp-Help-2.6.10-lucid.pet
- Gimp-2.6.8-lucid.pet
That's how you change the wallpaper?
And from which of 8 different mirrors? Perhaps trivial questions for me, but perhaps not for the casual email checking, facebooking, web browsing computer user. And perhaps it’s because I’ve been spoiled by a simple right-click, but it seems to me like the dialog box for changing the desktop wallpaper should be accessible from some place more intuitive than Puppy Menu -> Desktop -> Desktop Settings -> Nathan Wallpaper Setter. Or, for example, if I were looking for the control panel for my freshly installed operating system, I bet Puppy Menu -> Setup -> Setup Puppy -> Wizard Wizard would be pretty low on my list of things to click on.
Aside from its peculiarities, though, I’d say Puppy Linux is quite usable, especially when it comes to just sitting down to use the computer. If you’re not installing stuff, or configuring the perfect desktop layout, you’re probably going to be pleased with how little Puppy interferes with your getting stuff done.
Apps
Limited. Puppy comes with a fairly abundant selection of useful little tools and apps. And when the time comes to install that missing application, Puppy’s package manager lists literally dozens of packages ready to install. Granted, it may not be the most impressive software roster, but it is full of useful stuff like Firefox, Opera, Skype, Pidgin, Gimp, Blender, Wine, and the list goes on. Like I said, useful stuff. But not a lot of it. Puppy’s package manager does, however, list many other software repositories from which applications can be acquired, including Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx repositories, which, I’m sure, contain a plethora of cool software. So although it may not come preloaded with the most impressive selection of software, at least it gives you the option to improve it.
Overall
Worth checking out. It may not be for everybody, but if you’re looking for something simple and easy-to-use for your low-power netbook, I would recommend giving Puppy Linux, at least, a test run. It’s simple to set up and use. It may not be insanely configurable, but in exchange, it doesn’t make you think too much about how to do what you really want to do: browse the web, check your email and chat with your friends.
