puppy linux

A neighbor has an old sony computer, but no restore disk for windows me. We tried puppy linux 1.03 and it worked fine - even the winmodem worked.

On a spare machine that I have, I installed puppy linux 1.04 (chubby) and it went in fine. I did have to play with the grub menu.lst to get it to work the way I wanted (it is a dual boot system). I downloaded a few dotput programs and I installed wthem with the ROX file manager. It worked great!!!

Puppy Linux boots up in about 35 seconds (really fast for this 666 mghz computer). Everything works well. I used the wizard to setup the network and the samba client worked jsut fine. The packages included (such as OpenOffice.org) are all first rate and fairly complete. All the normal functionalities needed are covered.

The Puppy website has a lot of documentation, but you do have to look around a bit to find everything.

Overall, Puppy Linux is a very good distibution - especially for an older machine with limited resources. It is easy to install, has good applications, and is very adequate for normal home use. There are lots of packages available on-line. It is a Debian distribution off-shoot so it is fairly main line.

Thunderbird enigma

I have finally beenable to get the enigma extention installed - they have posted new install instructions and they work well. I can now digitally sign mail I send using enigma. It would be nice if AOL and Yahoo would also make this possible.