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Linux Distribution: Puppy
Url: http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
These are extraordinary goals, yet Puppy achieves them all. Obviously, some objectives have qualifications, for example, to load totally into RAM the PC must have either 128M RAM or failing that a swap partition. Also, the "will just work, no hassles" obj |
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| Linux Release Details: |
| Puppy Linux 4.1.1 has been released |
| Puppy 4.00 was a major upgrade from 3.01, with just about everything overhauled and updated. Version 4.1 continues the hectic pace of development, with ground-breaking new applications and under-the-hood architectural improvements over 4.00. Ground-breaking apps include our new Psip VOIP and PPLOG personal blog. Under-the-hood includes faster boot times, much better hardware detection, and new 'pup_event' architecture (including desktop drive icons). The live-CD file is 'puppy-4.1.1-k2.6.25.16-seamonkey.iso' at 94.1MB and 'puppy-4.1.1retro-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso' at 94.6MB. The latter is a more conservative kernel that perhaps suits older systems. |
Here is a summary of milestones along the way, with links to further information:
- 2.6.25.16, 2.6.21.7 kernels. The 'standard' Puppy has been built with the 2.6.25.16 kernel. The 'retro', which may work better on some older hardware, has been built with the 2.6.21.7 kernel and with a more conservative configuration. The older kernel is configured with the old IDE drivers (instead of PATA)*.
- More drivers. With help from forum member 'tempestuous' we have included many extra third-party drivers. Note that the 'retro' Puppy has more modem drivers (HSF modules).
- SCSI kernels. I have also compiled three SCSI kernels for 4.1retro, with different selections of SCSI drivers built-in. Puppy is now able to boot from a SCSI drive.
- LZMA-enabled kernel. The 2.6.25.16 kernel has an LZMA patch for smaller size, and optionally for a smaller initrd.gz (4.1 is built with LZMA-compressed vmlinuz, but the initrd is only gzipped).
- Improved PCMCIA support. Puppy has finally dropped the old pcmcia_cs package, now using the native uevent/udev mechanism.
- Hardware detection. Puppy has a major overhaul of hardware detection and module loading. The udevd daemon is now used (from the udev packge) and is supported by custom scripts. The total environment for hardware detection, hotplugging and general "event management" is named pup_event, and includes simple GUI management.
- Pup_event. The new pup_event system detects more hardware than before, automatically creates any missing devnodes (entries in /dev), loads firmware, detects hotplugged devices. This is also extended to the desktop, where drive icons appear and disappear as drives are added and removed. The behaviour of these desktop icons is fully configurable by a GUI.
- Faster boot. The main boot script /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit has been rewritten and is now simpler and faster. Considerable attention has been given to optimise boot speed, with parallel execution wherever possible and no unnecessary 'sleep' instructions.
- Psip VOIP. This is another major milestone for Puppy, our very own VOIP telephone/chat/messenger program, named Psip. This is a GUI developed "in house" and uses the pjsua commandline executable. Previously we have been prevented from including such an application in Puppy due to enormous dependencies (and hence huge size). Our guys have created something that is not only small, but works well and has an excellent GUI.
- PPLOG blog. Yet another major milestone, Puppy now has his very own blog! The Hiawatha web server is now built-in to Puppy, along with the PPLOG Perl blog. This is great for a personal diary, or to publish over an intranet or the Internet.
- Pmusic audio player. There is yet another new application developed "in house" by forum member 'zigbert'. This lovely music player fills a bit of a gap in the Puppy application-suite.
- Ayttm. The inbuilt multiprotocol chat client is now Ayttm instead of Pidgin. Thanks to the Ayttm developer Siddhesh for putting in considerable effort to improve Ayttm. Thanks to forum member 'Wolf_Pup' for an auto-login script to our #puppylinux IRC channel.
- Virus checker. Xfprot, a GUI frontend for the f-prot virus checker, has made a comeback. Not that Linux needs virus checking, but this is a great tool for checking Windows drive partitions.
- Network Wizard. The Network Wizard has undergone a major overhaul by forum member 'Dougal'. The layout of the GUI is more logical, and naming of profiles is improved, amongst many other things.
- Huge number of updated applications. Many updated applications and building-block packages, including Trash (disciple), Pburn (zigbert), Pfind (zigbert), Pschedule (zigbert), Pprocess (zigbert), Pmirror (zigbert), ndiswrapper, ntfs-3g, Fotoxx, xine-lib, unionfs, aufs, Pnethood (HairyWill), Xlock (Nathan), libgphoto2, gphoto2, Geany, hiawatha, inotify-tools, inotail, lzma, ePDFView, replaceit, mtPaint, pupX (Nathan), Wallpaper Setter (Nathan), Figaro's Password Manager, Gdmap, normalize, Pcdripper (plinej), Pwireless (plinej), Pdvdrsab (plinej), mut2 (Jesse), Sysprof, Xsoldier, Glade3, Gnumeric, Abiword.
- SeaMonkey with Mail&News. SeaMonkey has been upgraded to version 1.1.11 and now has the Mail & News component, replacing Sylpheed.
- Improved modem support. Puppy no longer probes for a serial modem and mouse at bootup, as that has proved unreliable, and is slow. In the case of a modem, other modem types are still auto-detected, and there has been major improvement of the PupDial and associated scripts to improve probing and modem setup post-bootup. Puppy is one of the few distros that is actively working on supporting Internet dialup users. Forum member 'rerwin' has been very active testing Puppy with various modems and improving our scripts -- look him up on the forum if you need help with your modem!
- GPRS modem. Puppy now supports Internet connection by Multitech USB GPRS modem, thanks to forum member 'lstandish' (Lloyd). This is also works for other GPRS modems, but we need more testing/verification.
- zdrv gone. Another under-the-hood thing: the 'zdrv' file is no more. For various reasons, the full set of modules are now available permanently in /lib/modules and the firmware tarballs in /lib/modules/firmware.
- Many bugs fixed. Many bugfixes and minor improvements. Some are mentioned above, many more not explicitly mentioned here but can be found by reading through my Developer News.
For Download
Click here to download: http://www.puppylinux.com/download
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