BREAKING NEWS: Hubble has succeeded in taking a visible-light picture of a planet circling another star. The planet’s three times the size of Jupiter and is called Fomalhaut b, orbiting star Fomalhaut, in the constellation Piscis Australis. Fomalhaut is a mere 25 light-years away. Way to go, Hubble! (Thanks to Fred Kiesche via SF Signal for this. OT comment: yes, considering that the new Star Trek movie is supposed to take place before TOS, I was expecting an Enterprise less sleek and more clunky too.) Continuing on the geek theme for Friday …

I think the reason I’ve taken to Linux is because I’m basically a difficult person to satisfy. Take my Aspire One. J gave it to me as a birthday present a few months ago, and I had the awful feeling its hal (Hardware Abstraction Layer) was corrupted even back then because I couldn’t connect to the internet every time the cable was plugged in. (Nope, there was nothing wrong with the cable.) That didn’t bother me too much because I wanted to use the netbook for writing and the fewer distractions available the better, right?

But then I didn’t like the default screen either. And I wanted wbar. And custom icons for particular favourite apps. And my Aspire went from this:

(And I mean, bleeech people. Just bleeech!) to something that more resembled this:

(with thanks to ADcomp from the AspireOne fora for the screenshot). But, somewhere in between all that tweaking, I completely lost access to all the Aspire’s external ports and my ethernet connection was only detected, on average, 10% of the time. This was not a happy situation for backups. What to do?

I re-stumbled (’cos I’d been there once before and bookmarked it because it was so cool) across pendrivelinux.com and was saved! Because I have a Netbook With Little Grunt, I opted for Puppy Linux, to see what it was made of. If you’re a geek like me, you’ll often have several USB sticks hanging around, so I grabbed an old Kingston 512MB, put Puppy 4.1 on it, set my Aspire’s BIOS to boot from the device, and presto! instant access. I could automount USB drives and get on the Net (after I remembered to run the Network wizard … doh!) without any hassle (thus confirming that the original supposition of corrupted hal files was correct). The default Puppy screen looks like this:

which is pretty sweet, except for all those icons crowding the screen. The resolution was so sharp, I almost cut my fingers on it. I could access my data and move it to safety. Flushed with success, I then loaded PCLinux OS on another USB stick (a 4GBer this time) and tried it out. This too worked, but Puppy felt a lot quicker and cleaner, and so I’m now back to it. Puppy is less than 100Mb in size, which means you’ll still have heaps of room left for bells and whistles on that Asus, MSI or Aspire of yours. The latest version comes with wireless/MP3/samba/Flash support ootb (Out Of The Box). There are also variations (called “Puplets”) with particular customisations. I’m looking for a Puppy + OpenOffice + wbar mashup, and think I’ll do it myself. And that is, at once, one of the strengths and weaknesses of Linux.

On the plus side, you get an incredible feeling of achievement from wading through the system yourself. You start to get a feel for where everything is and how it’s organised. It’s like having a car. There are people who feel more confident as drivers if they’re able to change a tyre, check on coolant levels, change sparkplugs and generally have an idea of how their car operates. If you’re this kind of person, I think you’ll enjoy Linux. Otoh, there are types who just want to get in and drive, only having to worry about filling up on a regular basis. For those kinds of people, I’d recommend they stick to Windows.

The one criticism that’s been levelled at Puppy is that the user runs as root. This means you are, essentially, the equivalent of a Windows user (as J put it), able to delete and move around files without any kinds of limits on the damage you do. Considering I’m only running my machine mostly to bang out words, that doesn’t bother me at all. Besides, I’m sick of having to use a command line or terminal to change permissions so I can shift files from one location to another. I understand the risks of being root and accept them, so that objection is not a strong one with me. (If I was loading Puppy for one of the kids, however, then it would certainly be a consideration.)

If you’d like to take Puppy Linux for a spin, their web page is here. From what I’ve read, Puppy is one person’s brainchild and he’s worked unceasingly on it. That person is Barry Kauler. You did a magnificent job, Barry. Well done!

A nice review of Puppy Linux 4.1 is here if you’re curious about what it contains (a lot!).

PenDriveLinux I’ve already mentioned, but here it is again! Another great site.

And last, but not least, many thanks to jimyjazz for bringing the topic up on the Aspire One fora to begin with.

It’s been a while since I was so excited about using a new Linux distro. (A month or so ago, I believe, when I downloaded Mandriva’s latest. Low boredom threshold, much?) Am now looking forward to welcoming a new Puppy home!