Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2011, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> I just installed and read forum postings for a Puppy Linux derivative Pulp 
> 0.10 (fast light puppy) which uses mostly gtk-1.2 programs.   Since they are 
> compiled for glibc 2.6 we can't just borrow them, but some of them might be 
> worth compiling for BL.
>
> xnview image viewer
gqview now - I think I compiled and posted it for BL.

There are still a few optional GTK2 programs, which the author said load 
very slowly.  I tried one and waited about 10 seconds.  See the forum. He 
tried to replace everything with GTK 1.2 programs.  I see why Steven is 
not interested in GTK2 browsers.

This is the most recent of many attempts to make Puppy run in less RAM. 
It uses close to 128MB normally before even running programs, due to all 
the fancy stuff they keep adding.

Pulp has kernel 2.6, libc 2.6, gtk1 and 2, and it runs Opera 11 (I did not 
need to add libqt) on my 96MB 233MHz Thinkpad 560X in real time.  (I 
turned on turbo hoping to speed up loading of images).  Boots to 13MB 
including one console and rxvt and Xorg (Xvesa won't work with Trident 
Cyberblade) which is similar to BL memory usage with XF86.  The author 
stripped out the decorations so no icons, just a menu, with jwm, mplayer, 
etc.  Takes over a minute to boot (BL is much faster) but you can probably 
tweak it some more not to hunt for new hardware at boot time.  Uses 51MB 
memory with Opera 11 runnning.  (Opera 11 in XP uses 60MB).  Comes with a 
lot of network card drivers including cardbus wireless.  Based on a 2009 
Puppy 4.12.

It will probably also run Chrome and Firefox 3 but slowly.  They might 
need more memory.  (In XP they used about 40MB).  There are puppy packages 
or you can simply unpack a standard binary package on / and run it from a 
wrapper script.  Seamonkey 1.1.19 works fine, in little memory.

Could not get cs4232 ISA chip working with alsaconf (no such device, 
though it worked on my other thinkpad with pulp) but it works fine with 
BL2.  When automated setups fail they are 'horrid'. It also crashed on the 
first boot until I removed the pcmcia network card (which it misidentified 
at the time) but now works with it.  Firefox 2 crashed on here but works 
on the other Thinkpad.


As Steven said, there are other distros for newer hardware (new enough to 
have USB ports) but this is the first one I got going in 96MB RAM.  It can 
be made to boot with loadlin (unlike TinyCore), and has linmodem support 
(unlike Slitaz) and uses jwm.  Something was changed to get pretty blue 
rounded-edge buttons that don't work without a mouse, but I will fix that 
eventually.

Not for Windows addicts - nothing but a menu to click on and a few 
indicators of battery charge, sound, and wireless setup (which does not 
work on this laptop, though the wireless wizard does work).  Also a 'show 
desktop' which is odd since the desktop is blank.  Perhaps there is some 
way to add things to it.  This is still probably beta.  BL is more 
predictable.

Maybe it is time to give up on bringing BL into the 21st century and not 
expect it to work for all websites, or flash, or anything GTK2, or VOIP.

Sindi