On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 11:24:03PM -0400, Apollia wrote: > > Regarding desktops - perhaps Puppy Linux might be a good place to look for > some inspiration? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_Linux > > So small, light, fast, and relatively easy to use, even for total Linux > newbies.
Ah yes, Puppy Linux. I've used that a lot. (Most of) the standard ingredients are an apt-get away; it's usually jwm, rxvt-unicode, mhwaveedit, geany, abiword, gnumeric, ... Partly it's looking for lightweight applications, partly it's avoiding duplicates (though there are a few of those!), and partly it's the window manager and related details. In a standard Puppy, there is no Python; I'm not sure if Perl is stock, either. > I have to admit, some of the default out-of-the-box settings of most any > Puppy Linux I've tried annoy the heck out of me, like having to > single-click instead of double-click to open things. > > But the software preinstalled in them is often quite nice and well-chosen, > and many quickly became favorites of mine. (Geany, NoteCase, mtPaint, > Viewnior, etc...) > > And most Puppy Linuxes I've tried make it very easy to get on the internet, > something I recall usually being difficult to do back in 2011 when I was a > Windows XP user trying various Linux live discs. Last I knew, there were at least 3 network managers that were puppy-specific (Simple Network Scanner, Frisbee, PeasyWifi...and maybe clinet from pupngo counts also). All the standard ones are written in shellscript + gtkdialog. Even though there's an icon for the terminal right on the desktop, the Puppy Linux developers work on the assumption that you should never *need* to open it to get things working. <snip> > I've also increasingly been considering trying to build my own Linux from > scratch, probably using this website as a guide: > http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ If you want a short build, look at Bootstrap Linux or ELFS: https://github.com/pikhq/bootstrap-linux http://kanj.github.io/elfs/book/ (and clfs-embedded is simple too, but it's harder to get.) As a rule of thumb, before you try building a Linux system from scratch you should make sure you can configure a kernel that works for your hardware. Spoiler: "make localmodconfig" and "make localyesconfig" are your friends. > Another good thing about Puppy Linux is that it's one of the major holdouts > against adopting systemd, according to this blog post by Barry Kauler, the > creator of Puppy Linux: > > http://bkhome.org/news/?viewDetailed=00114 > > > One of my favorite things about Puppy Linux is the fact that the entire > operating system can be loaded into RAM, which helps make things very fast. This requires stripping everything down as small as possible, choosing small programs, and so on. > Another of my favorite things is that I don't have to even have the OS > installed on my hard disk, and thus I don't have to worry that I might > accidentally break my entire system and have to reinstall everything from > scratch just because of installing (or doing) the wrong thing. This is due to the use of squashfs and aufs (Another Union Filesystem). squashfs is a compressed archive with a readonly "driver" in the kernel. Union filesystems, in general, create a "filesystem" by layering multiple mounts. A Pupsave file is a file containing a ext* filesystem that gets mounted as the top layer of a union filesystem, over an SFS layer. <snip> > Another type of Puppy installation is a "full installation". If I'm not > mistaken, the difference between a Puppy full installation and a Puppy > frugal installation (with a Pupsave file) is, I think a full installation > isn't loaded into RAM, and changed files get saved to disk immediately, > rather than being saved to a Pupsave file after a delay and either > automatically and periodically, or upon the user's request. A full install is a classic Linux install, with no layers and no SFS. > (With a frugal installation without a Pupsave file, nothing gets saved, and > you just get asked at shutdown whether you want to create a Pupsave file, > and you're able to refuse to create one.) > > I believe a frugal installation + a Pupsave file is probably the most > frequently recommended way of doing things - but a full installation might > in some circumstances be better, such as on a system with too little RAM to > comfortably load the entire operating system into RAM. > > > Anyway, I haven't yet heard of anyone else using a similar approach to the > way I run Linux - always booting my system from scratch with a default > Puppy Linux frugal installation with no Pupsave file, and then running my > Puppy Linux Setup Kit to install all of my customizations and preferred > software, and never saving anything to a Pupsave file, nor saving anything > to a multisession live CD or DVD of Puppy. I haven't looked at what you do/what they did, but this sounds vaguely like what Tinycore Linux does. Thanks, Isaac Dunham a/k/a "ibidem" on the Puppy Linux forums _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
