Puppy Linux

Nomad said:

It's kind of ugly, but it gets the job done.

Slitaz's combination of lxpanel and Openbox makes for quite an attractive desktop, check out some screenies. It has a package manager too.

I've got it installed on a 1GB USB thumb drive, it boots faster on my old P4 PC than Windows on my new hardware.

It is might cool.

Cool! And I bet you MS-DOS 3.0 would boot EVEN FASTER!!

Bucket said:

Cool! And I bet you MS-DOS 3.0 would boot EVEN FASTER!!

Not without a floppy drive it wouldn't :S

I didn't know you needed a floppy drive to download MS-DOS.

Bucket said:
I didn't know you needed a floppy drive to download MS-DOS.

You're not going to get it to boot off of a USB drive though (well some BIOSes might emulate a floppy or hard drive over USB, but I've never been able to get that to work), and I doubt version 3.0 will react favourably to being placed on a multigigabit hard drive...

(Edit: I take that back, it might work if it's placed in a 32MB or smaller partition at or near the start of the disk...)

Anyway, point is, of course it's going to boot faster if the OS is smaller (and hence, less capable).

Smaller doesn't necessarily mean less capable.

Bucket said:
Anyway, point is, of course it's going to boot faster if the OS is smaller (and hence, less capable).

I think Rankle's point was that Puppy Linux booted faster on an older system than Windows does on a new one. From a USB drive, too (presumably the Windows install is on a hard drive)...

(And as Nomad points out, smaller doesn't necessarily mean less capable.)

Or more appropriately: it doesn't never mean less capable, where Linux is concerned.

I thought Rankle was referring to the fact that DOS pauses for an unnecessarily long time if booted without a floppy drive. I haven't tested much, but I thought this was more a feature of DOS-era BIOSes than the OS itself.

Amusingly, if you have an ext2/3/4 partition anywhere, you can boot a DOS floppy image directly from a bootloader like GRUB (howto).

Hey wait a minute. DOS image... GRUB... Vanilla Doom... This has potential :)

I tried SliTaz with the computer I'm working on, and it didn't seem to work. Puppy Linux seemed to work just fine, but I just don't like the GUI... Meh.

CODOR said:

You're not going to get it to boot off of a USB drive though (well some BIOSes might emulate a floppy or hard drive over USB, but I've never been able to get that to work), and I doubt version 3.0 will react favourably to being placed on a multigigabit hard drive...

Tell that to my bootable USB drive that uses the boot files from a win98se disk.

Bucket said:
it doesn't never mean less capable

So it always means less capable?

Nah - "doesn't never" isn't "never doesn't".

Super Jamie said:
Hey wait a minute. DOS image... GRUB... Vanilla Doom... This has potential :)

See also MEMDISK. Diskless systems netbooting Doom (via DOS of some sort) would be pretty spiffy...

Planky said:
Tell that to my bootable USB drive that uses the boot files from a win98se disk.

I don't know if DOS 3.x will work, though. Does the USB drive show up as A:, C: or something else?

I have a 32MB USB drive and an MS-DOS 3.2 bootdisk around here someplace, I should actually try it...

CODOR said:

I don't know if DOS 3.x will work, though. Does the USB drive show up as A:, C: or something else?

I have a 32MB USB drive and an MS-DOS 3.2 bootdisk around here someplace, I should actually try it...

I see no reason it wouldn't work. Download a copy of HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and point it to the boot files. Shows as c: drive.

CODOR said:

I think Rankle's point was that Puppy Linux booted faster on an older system than Windows does on a new one. From a USB drive, too (presumably the Windows install is on a hard drive)...

(And as Nomad points out, smaller doesn't necessarily mean less capable.)

Yes its on a 1GB USB stick, connected to a USB 2.0 PCI card on my old P4. Faster than Windows running on a hard disk on a faster PC.

It does everything I need it to do on the machine, internet, email, graphic edit on "The Gimp", messing about with Python.