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Puppy on a CD |
I tried lots of Linuxes on my PC. All are too slow. LiveCD are better. But the Puppy is unbelievably fast (it reminded me BeOS 5PE system - a unique one). I give a word to use only Puppy for the future. No.1 ! * |
Download
An ISO file is a single file that you burn onto a CD, then reboot the PC and off you go. The file will be named something like "puppy-2.xx-xxxx.iso", for example "puppy-2.10-seamonkey.iso". Download:
Then use your favourite CD burner software and burn "puppy-2.xx-xxxx.iso" onto a CD/R.
WARNING FOR NEWBIES:
If you don't know anything about burning an ISO
file to CD, read the documentation that comes with your CD-burner software.
The biggest single mistake is that people treat the "puppy-2.xx-xxxx.iso" file as
just a file, and write it to CD. Any decent CD-burner software will have a
special menu selection for writing an ISO file to CD. You will know that you
have succeeded if, after burning it, you use a file manager such as Windows
Explorer to look at the CD and you see the files "image.gz", "vmlinuz", etc.
If you see the file "puppy-2.xx-xxxx.iso" then you did it wrong!
The thing to understand about an ISO file is
that it is a snapshot of the entire contents of a CD, so has lots of files
inside it.
UPDATE: Active
contributor on the Puppy Forum, GuestToo, has discovered a Windows application
called BurnCDCC, that just burns ISO files
to CD, nothing else, so you can't go wrong. The URL is: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html.
All recent versions of Puppy also have a little program (that we sometimes call a "script" as it is written in an interpreted lanaguage, not compiled) called Burniso2cd. I wrote this especially for burning ISO files to CD or DVD and it is very simple to use. It is found in the "Multimedia" menu in Puppy. If you have a running Puppy, I recommend Burniso2cd for burning Puppy ISO files.
How to install Puppy
Actually, you don't have to (install Puppy, that is). If you want to
follow Puppy development but
remain fairly casually involved, just bootup from the CD. When you boot
Puppy
from the CD for the very first time, Puppy files will load off the CD
into RAM and run totally from RAM -- however at the first shutdown you
will be offered to create a file on your hard drive or USB drive, to be
used for storing all your personal data.
Thus, next time you bootup, all your personal settings and data, such
as
email, is still there.
Thus, the only thing "installed" on your hard drive is one single unobtrusive file, that does not affect (or rather, should not affect) whatever is currently installed on the hard drive (such as Windows).
When a new version of Puppy is released, just burn it to CD and bootup.
Nothing else to do to upgrade, and all your personal data is still there. In
this way, you can follow Puppy development with the absolute least
hassles. If you wish, use a CD-RW (ReWritable) so as not to waste CDs.
If you do want to install Puppy, read the other Puppy pages, for example
"Hard-drive", "USB" -- click on the "Go to home page" button at top of this page, then follow the links.
Booting the PC from CD
Almost all PCs support booting from CD or DVD. If not already
configured, it is a matter of invoking the BIOS setup when the PC first
powers-up. Most often this is done by pressing the DEL key, but some
PCs require a function key to be pressed, such as F2. Then, what is
called the "boot order" can be setup, and you would typically set CD
drive first then hard drive, or you can include a USB drive or floppy
drive in the boot-check sequence.
If you have an older PC that cannot boot from CD, there is a
fall-back. This fall-back applies also to PCs that cannot boot from a
USB drive. This is to use a boot floppy. Puppy has something especially
for this situation, called WakePup,
developed by Puppy enthusiast "pakt" -- look in the "Setup" menu and
you will see an entry "WakePup create boot floppy". This will create a
floppy disk that your PC can boot from. The WakePup floppy disk scans
the PC and finds Puppy on a USB drive, hard drive, or CD/DVD drive.
Note however, as it is a DOS-based system WakePup can only recognise
ISO9660 and FAT filesystems. CDs use the ISO9660 filesystem for holding
files, so that is okay. USB pen drives are usually formatted with FAT16
filesystem, so that is also okay. MSDOS and Windows 95/98 installations
are in hard drive partitions with FAT filesystems, so again okay.
Thus, WakePup will not recognise Puppy installed in a NTFS (Windows XP) hard drive partition, nor a Linux partition.
Multisession CD/DVD
Normally you would save your
personal data in the pup_save.3fs file on the hard drive. However,
there is an alternative, something that many people think is the single
most exciting feature of puppy -- you can save your personal files back to the CD or DVD. Yep, everything, email, downloaded files, installed packages.
To find out more: Multisession Puppy
Remaster the CD
After you have burned Puppy on a CD, and you then decide that you would like to make changes to the CD, it is now very easy to pull apart the contents of the CD and put it back together again.
After booting up the live-CD, go to the "Setup" menu and select "Remaster Puppy live-CD". This will take you through simple steps to create a new CD. Your PC will of course need to have a CD-burner.
Remastering enables you to completely change Puppy. The basic idea
is you make custom changes, download any extra packages that you would
like to have on the CD, then run the remaster-CD script.
Puppy Unleashed
Or, build a Puppy live-CD totally from scratch, with only those applications that you need.
What if you don't like Seamonkey, the web browser used in the 'standard' release of Puppy? What if you would rather have Opera? Or, the Xvesa X server supplied with the standard Puppy doesn't work on an old PC, and you need Xfbdev,
a framebuffer X server? Or you want to cut the size of the ISO file way down? No problem, you can now choose your own mix of
packages, and create a custom live-CD with exactly what you need. The
complete collection of over 350 packages designed to work in Puppy is
available and is called Puppy Unleashed. Here is the introductory page:
PET and DotPup packages
Puppy has two package installation systems, called PET and
DotPup. These offer many extra packages, and the good news is
that you do not have to install Puppy to USB or hard drive to be able
to install these packages -- that is, although only booting Puppy from
live-CD, you can still install extra packages.
Find out more about the package management:
Puppy package management.
C/C++ compiling
Booting Puppy from live-CD has hardly any limitations compared with
a full hard drive installation. You can even compile source packages.
Puppy has an incredibly simple system for converting into a full
C/C++ compiling environment. A single file, devx_xxx.sfs, is all that
is required. The "xxx" in the filename is the version number, for
example, Puppy 2.10 will be "210".
Running Puppy from live-CD, you will have a personal storage file,
named pup_save.3fs, on the hard drive -- you will find it in /mnt/home
folder.
All you have to do is download devx_xxx.sfs to the same place, that is,
into /mnt/home/. Then reboot, and that's it, you're ready to do all
that 'configure', 'make' and 'make install' stuff.
One thing I do recommend though. Your hard drive should have a Linux
swap partition, as Linux can use this extra storage space if it runs
low on physical RAM. Compiling does tend to use a lot of RAM space.
To find out how to compile the Linux kernel: How to compile the kernel
Just
a note on the side about hard drive partitions. Windows XP uses the
NTFS format for partitions, and Microsoft keeps the format a secret,
like every other format and protocol -- which is the main reason
Microsoft keeps its monopoly. Therefore, Linux support of NTFS is not
perfect. If you really want to embrace open standards, and really give
Linux a go, you do need to create a Linux partition and a Linux swap
partition, on your hard drive. There are tools to do this -- these
tools can safely (no guarantees though!) reduce the size of the NTFS partition and create the
new ones -- checkout GParted, to be found in the "Control Panel" menu.
Recently a free native ext2 driver
has become available for Windows NT/XP, so Windows can use a ext2
partition just like any other NTFS or VFAT (the older Windows 9x
partition format) drive. Link: http://www.fs-driver.org/
If you take the trouble to do this, your play with Puppy will be so much more fruitful.