Hello All,

I downloaded the file 'puppy-1.0.8r1-mozilla.iso' from http://www.puppylinux.org/user/downloads.php?cat_id=1and burned it into a CD. It is an amazing and cute distro that surprisingly detected my display, sound as well as my usb pen drive. [P4 2.66, Intel 845 GEBV2, 256 Mb RAM, 80 GB HDD] It has a very nice looking desktop giving all the useful icons with their functional names in text. It is very useful for home users who want a simple straightforward system with a good foundation.

It has 5 boot options and initially I selected option 4 (RAM only). When you boot into it, it asks you to confirm your hardware and gives options for sound along with a test sound to know everything is up. Display settings come in different combinations and I used 1024x768x24. Thats something very handy.

The best part of this live cd is that it can be installed into a pen drive or hard drive. It has these options in the live cd itself so no messing around with command line codes. . It can be installed on a seperate partition and uses ext2 as the fs. This os is useful to give to family members who want a simple and easy os and their usage will not mess with the existing distros. It works only as root so it will be equivalent to Win 98 or Win Me. It has a firewall setup too so that closes all your ports from outside. Applications wise, it has everything one can imagine in an standard OS. Its media player could directly play vcds with proper video and sound. The trancend flash drive was detected and usable too. It can mount ntfs partitions in read only mode.

Some points to note while installation:-

1. Don't install the grub boot loader if you already have grub distros installed, add the entries to your existing grub later.

2. Due to that, it does not install the image file in the hdd. It only saves the vmlinuz file in the /boot folder. Therefore, the file 'image.gz' will have to be manually copied to that /boot folder. For the newbies, here is that part of menu.lst in grub that was added later to the existing distro. Partition numbers will vary.

# linux installation on /dev/hda12. title PUPPY LINUX 1.0.8 (on /dev/hda12) root (hd0,11) kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda12 initrd /boot/image.gz savedefault boot

3. The sound did not load during hdd bootup so I booted the live cd again and selected the option to ask for the partition. There I pointed to my partition and the pup001 configuration was saved there. After the live bootup with sound working, I booted through the HDD and sound was up.

This distro should be ideal for home users, old pc users ( not tried it out) and people scared of using computers.

Regards,

Rony.

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