Vanilla Dpup and Upup progress

I have posted before that Dima (dimkr) and Mick (01micko) are developing the "testing" branch of woof-CE. In March 2021, I reported on Dima's work on a Puppy without an initrd, using "frugalify":

https://bkhome.org/news/202103/puppy-linux-without-an-initrd.html

They have also been developing a more traditional next-generation Puppy, pre-fixed "Vanilla-"; currently there is Vanilla-Upup and Vanilla-Dpup, based on Ubuntu and Debian packages respectively. These have an initrd.

I decided it is time to have a look how these Vanilla-* pups are coming along. Downloaded Vanilla Dpup 9.2.0 from here:

https://github.com/vanilla-dpup/releases/releases

Forum thread:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=6002

And downloaded Vanilla Upup 22.04.39 from here:

https://github.com/dimkr/woof-CE/releases

Forum thread:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=5290

Only did a quick play with each. Impression was, everything I tried worked. Very smooth, nice UIs, easy connection to my wi-fi. Overall: impressed.

Ha ha, I don't use optical media anymore, but for these took a trip down memory lane, burnt the iso's to CD's and booted them. In the case of Dpup, it took almost 2 minutes (117 seconds) to copy the sfs's to RAM. That would have been a few seconds off a USB-stick. So, reminded how clunky and slow CD's are.

One of the reasons that I have looked at these, is I wanted to see if the Puppy traditional PPM package manager and apt & Synaptic "talk" to each other. They are all installed.

Using Synaptic, I installed Scribus, that went smoothly. But the installed packages did not show up in the PPM. So the answer is "no", they don't talk to each other.

I am getting interested in installing apt and maybe Synaptic in Easy Bookworm, but only if can get it to talk with the PPM.

Just an observation: in my brief experience with installing Scribus, Synaptic did not bring anything superior compared to doing it with the PPM. I tested installing Scribus in Easy Bookworm 0.4, with Easy's own PPM, and it went smoothly, and Scribus worked. Just an observation.    

Tags: linux