| Puppy + EEE = Puppeee |
Apr. 11, 2008
 They say that every dog has its day. Could the growing popularity of Asus's low-cost EEE notebook launch Puppy Linux into the limelight?
The EEE
(Click for details) |
The EEE (pictured at right) comes with Xandros Linux, by default, with Windows XP also an option on the newest model. But there's a third dog in the race now, and one that's capable of running circles around either of the weightier contenders.
Announced back in January, and evolved since then through a series of rapid releases, Puppeee can be run from a USB key, to preserve your EEE's existing OS installation. Or, it can be launched from an external CD or USB key and installed onto your EEE's solid-state disk or other storage device.
Puppy will outperform other OSes on the EEE because its filesystem is loaded onto a RAM disk at boot time. PCs access memory much, much faster than storage, so Puppy will run like an AKC Whippet on the EEE's 900MHz Celeron processor. The first time EEE users try Puppy, they're going to be amazed at the pure performance of this OS!
Puppeee screenshot
(Click to enlarge)
The downside is that Puppy is a fairly small set of applications tightly hooked together via shared libraries. Adding software of your own, even software from other, larger Puppy implementations, can be pretty challenging. So you'll have to decide between a rich, slow standard OS and Puppeee's zippier but more limited mix.
Puppeee screenshot
(Click to enlarge)
The Puppeee mix at present, in addition to a browser and email client, appears to include:- Abiword (word processor)
- XMMS (media player)
- Skype (voip softphone)
- xine (movie player)
- GQview (webcam viewer)
- audacity (multitrack audio editor)
- handbrake (dvd-to-mpeg transcoder)
- calculator
- gftp
- various utilities
Also, given that Puppeee is just, well, a puppy, it may take a while for it to mature into a really user-friendly OS for those who do *not* enjoy bolting down their own airplane seat. Meanwhile there are several other Linux OSes out there made just for the EEE, according to an article at Linux.com.
--Henry Kingman
(Click here for further information)
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