Διανομή Linux για μικρά συστήματα

Puppy OS screenshot

Προέρχεται από τον simosx.

Υπάρχουν μια σειρά από διανομές Linux που δεν έχουν μεγάλες απαιτήσεις σε χώρο στο σκληρό δίσκο ή επιδόσεις από τον επεξεργαστή. Ακόμα, είναι εύκολο να γίνει η εγκατάστασή τους σε USB stick/CDROM/Προσομοιωτή/ZIP Disk/Σκληρό δίσκο/κτλ με αποτέλεσμα να είναι αρκετά φορητά.

Τέτοιες διανομές είναι

  • Feather Linux, που συνδυάζει όλα τα αρχεία σε λιγότερο από 128ΜΒ (βασίζεται σε Knoppix remaster),
  • Damn Small Linux (DSL), που συνδυάζει όλα τα αρχεία σε λιγότερο από 50ΜΒ.
  • Puppy Linux (PuppyOS), που συνδυάζει όλα τα αρχεία σε λιγότερο από 70ΜΒ.

Για το Damn Small Linux (DSL), τα χαρακτηριστικά είναι

  • Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
  • Boot from a USB pen drive
  • Boot from within a host operating system (that’s right, it can run *inside* Windows)
  • Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call “frugal install”
  • Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
  • Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
  • Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
  • Modularly grow — DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize

Για το Puppy Linux (PuppyOS), τα χαρακτηριστικά είναι

  • Puppy will easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media.
  • Booting from CD, Puppy will load totally into RAM so that the CD drive is then free for other purposes.
  • Booting from CD, Puppy can save everything back to the CD, no need for a hard drive.
  • Booting from USB, Puppy will greatly minimise writes, to extend the life of Flash devices indefinitely.
  • Puppy will be extremely friendly for Linux newbies.
  • Puppy will boot up and run extraordinarily fast.
  • Puppy will have all the applications needed for daily use.
  • Puppy will just work, no hassles.
  • Puppy will breathe new life into old PCs

Τέτοιες διανομές είναι πολύ σημαντικές διότι προσεγγίζουν τη λειτουργικότητα του OLPC.
Χρησιμοποίησα το Puppy OS σε USB stick και παρακάτω είναι μια σειρά από σχόλια

  • Σε τυπικό φορητό υπολογιστή Pentium M, η διανομή είναι πολύ διαδραστική. Κάθε λειτουργία ξεκινά πολύ γρήγορα και δεν ακούς καθόλου το ανεμιστηράκι (ίσως πρέπει να ενεργοποιήσετε το powersave kernel module για το φορητό σας :)).
  • Οι διανομές αυτές χρησιμοποιούν τον πυρήνα 2.4.x. Είδα ότι υπήρχαν χρήστες που έκαναν αναβάθμιση σε 2.6.x, δεν ξέρω αν αλλάζει κάτι σημαντικό στη διαδραστικότητα ή στη χρήση της μνήμης.
  • Υπάρχει Firefox και δουλεύει αρκετά καλά. Ωστόσο, ο υπολογιστής έχει 512ΜΒ RAM και μπορείτε να δείτε στο στιγμιότυπο ότι γίνεται χρήση ενός σεβαστού ποσού της μνήμης.
  • Το Abiword ξεκινά πολύ γρήγορα, είναι διαδραστικό. Πολύ όμορφα.
  • Δεν κατάφερα να γράψω ελληνικά διότι η έκδοση αυτή του XFree86 δεν είχε τα απαραίτητα αρχεία με τις διατάξεις πληκτρολογίου. Γενικά θα είναι προβληματική η κατάσταση αυτή αν δεν υπάρχει μικροεφαρμογή που να δείχνει την τρέχουσα ενεργή διάταξη πληκτρολογίου.
  • Η βασική γραμματοσειρά δεν έχει ποιοτικά ελληνικά, μπορεί κάποιος να εγκαταστήσει DejaVu ρίχνοντας τα αρχεία στο ~/.fonts/
  • Υπάρχει διαχειριστής πακέτων και μπορείτε να εγκαταστήσετε νέες εφαρμογές σχετικά εύκολα.
  • Ο διαχειριστής παραθύρων νομίζω ότι είναι ο fvwm. Η βασική εγκατάσταση είναι αρκετά βασική. Ωστόσο, άλλοι χρήστες κατάφεραν και είχαν πολύ καλύτερο αποτέλεσμα.
  • Κατά την εκκίνηση γίνεται αντιγραφή του περιεχομένου του USB stick στο σκληρό δίσκο. Δεν ξέρω αν αυτό είναι απαίτηση ή γίνεται για λόγους ταχύτητας. Μετά το κλείσιμο του υπολογιστή, το αρχείο αυτό αντιγράφεται πίσω στο USB stick.

Ενημέρωση: Υλοποίηση proof-of-concept με τη χρήση του Puppy Linux για το OLPC.

Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/puppy-os-screenshot/

11 comments

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  1. Thanks for this article and for visiting the PuppyLinux page in the OLPC wiki ( http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/PuppyLinux ).

    Cheers from the Puppy Linux enthusiasts! ( http://puppylinux.org )

    • Simeon Nifos on June 16, 2006 at 18:17
    • Reply

    Hi there!
    Is there any HowTo/Tutorial explaining all the steps required
    to install Greek Fonts in Puppy Linux? What about Abiword and
    Greek? What about switching between Greek and English keybord
    by a key combination like ALT LEFT_SHIFT? What about Greek in
    emacs?

    If such a tutorial doesn’t exist out there then could you please
    address those issues?

    Cheers!
    Simeon.

  2. Hi Simeon!

    I am not aware of an existing tutorial that describes the issues of adding Greek support to Puppy Linux. I believe that such tutorials should exist for languages such as French, German, Spanish, etc.

    Regarding fonts, you can add Greek support by simply adding the DejaVu fonts, found at
    http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/
    in the directory ~/.fonts/
    The DejaVu fonts provide adequate support for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, so you can safely use as the default system fonts.
    I hope the Puppy Linux project use the DejaVu fonts as the default fonts, bringing a uniform desktop for all latin/greek/cyrillic-based languages.

    Regarding writing support, it is an issue of having the xkeyboard-config (google this) package available with the X server.
    I checked the previous version of Puppy (before 2.0) and I noticed that all keyboard configuration files from XFree86 where not installed. Puppy 2.0 includes Xorg which is really good. I do not know if xkeyboard-config is there; if it is, you simply need to run

    $ setxkbmap -layout \’us+gr\’ -model pc105 -option \’grp:alt_shift_toggle\’

    If \”gr\” does not work, try \”el\”.

    I am not aware of a keyboard indicator applet that shows what is the current language, in the windows manager that Puppy Linux provides.

    • Simeon Nifos on June 16, 2006 at 19:25
    • Reply

    Thanks for the reply!
    I will try what you suggested. There is one more issue though which
    spoils my mood against puppy. That is the developing issue.
    Puppy 2.00 provides a file devx_200.sfs. This file if succesfully
    loaded provides a complete developing environment (without emacs
    unfortunately).

    What one should do to install it is boot with puppy 2.0 CD then
    reboot immediately and when you are asked whther or not you want
    to save the pup_200.3fs you say yes and you choose where you want
    to save that file(some FAT32 or ext3 partition will do fine).
    Then you reboot and place the devx_200.sfs file in the same partition
    pup_200.3fs was saved. You reboot once more and if you open a terminal
    you can see that all developing tools (make, gcc, g e.t.c.) work fine.

    What happens if you want after all that to install puppy to some hard-disk
    partition? You follow the script but … after rebooting you frick out
    because the developing tools are not there \”command not found\”. This
    issue didn\’t show up with older versions of puppy like the pizza.iso.
    Everything worked fine as it worked from the live CD when I use the
    pizza.iso live CD. Do you know why?

    Moreover is it possible to install emacs in Puppy? I have searched
    all the packages and the corresponding files but there was nowhere
    I could find emacs compiled for Puppy.

    Anyway I like puppy too much because it is small and compact and
    it provides a very user friendly interface for setting up network
    (specially wireless). Other Linux Distros (Gentoo blablabla) are not
    so user friendly as it concerns a lot of stuff. The problem with
    Puppy is that it doesn\’t provide a port system like Gentoo or FreeBSD.
    I would like to be able to compile my own kernel and compile and download
    ports as easily as I can with Gentoo or FreeBSD.

    What do you think?

  3. The reason I like Puppy Linux is because it can run rather well from a USB stick, a small partition or a DVDRW disk. Once you start Puppy, it rans from memory. If you can get a computer with 128MB or better 256MB, it can run from RAM all the way. Like the OLPC is supposed to do.

    If you would like to do development, I would recommend you to try out Ubuntu Linux 6.06. It has out-of-the-box support for Greek and also allows easily to setup a build environment using a GUI tool. Most new hardware are supported out of the box. There is a version of Ubuntu called Xubuntu, which uses the XFCE window manager, which is ok for small systems. I do not know the level of localisation on Xubuntu; I guess the Ubuntu is the best you can get at this time.

    Puppy has some small issues here and there; they are easy to fix but then it’s important to contact the developers so that the fixes are added in the new version. Although this sounds natural, it’s sadly common that small fixes do not make it in the distribution and people get used to manually fixing between versions. This issue has been happening with the Greek font support in distributions; users where told to install the Microsoft fonts as the first task when they install a distribution, while there are Greek fonts of acceptable quality already available.

    I cannot help you with the development specifics of Puppy; I had an issue myself when trying to install Puppy 2.0 on a USB stick where the default paths of the files was wrong. I do not understand yet the process of duplication of Puppy to other devices to fix the issue.

    Also, in Puppy 2.0, the power management kernel modules for my laptop are not available, therefore the fan works all the time; that’s something I do not want to have. How do I find the kernel modules?

    • Simeon Nifos on June 17, 2006 at 20:02
    • Reply

    Hi there,
    For Development I use Gentoo and FreeBSD. I have to say here that
    I have never found such a convenient way of setting up wireless
    and other stuff anywhere else than Puppy. Puppy provides some
    extremely user friendly scripts. Gentoo and FreeBSD are miles
    away.

    Switching to Ubuntu is something I wouldn’t do since I can
    do developing easily with Gentoo and FreeBSD. I liked the
    Puppy idea because benchmarks proved it to be faster than
    Gentoo 1% to 5% depending on the application. Not to mention
    how fast each application loads. There are some issues though
    which make my life harder. The correspondence with the developers
    takes time and I am really running out of time. As for the power
    management I think you have to compiler your own kernel from scratch.

    What is missing is a HowTo explaining step by step the construnction
    of a custom-puppy distro. Then you can do it once burn it and have everything
    you really need really compact and nice. We have to convince somehow the
    developers to write such a HowTo. I know that some puppy from scratch do
    exist but they are really limited to a semi-automatic way. I am talking
    about doing everything manually. Download source code and compile yourself.

    I have installed DejaVu fonts and they work fine. There are some webpages
    though including your own (not the current one but the blog one) where
    I see “Chinese” instead of Greek. Is there something missing? I have
    installed dejavu-ttf-2.6.tar.gz. Do I need to install al the other packages
    as well? Please let me know.

  4. To find documents on how to customise Puppy Linux, do a search for “remaster”; for example “remaster puppy linux”. There are quite a few documents.

    DejaVu has full support for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, which is amazing for a Free and Open-Source font. The Unicode standard defines a quarter of a million of characters (glyphs), so you will be able to find fonts that do not provide full Unicode coverage; you need to install fonts for the missing Unicode blocks.

    On my blog I have written an entry in Coptic; the script they use to represent the ancient Egyptian language and it is currently used in religious documents of the Coptic Church in Egypt and elsewhere. The Coptic script is derived from the Greek script and it reminds the writing on icons of the Byzantine era.

    Coptic is a new script in Unicode, so only a few fonts have support for it. If you read the previous blog entry to the one with the funny letters, you will have a full picture of the Coptic script and where to get fonts from. The blog entry that you cannot read at all is written in Greek, using the Coptic script, meaning that if you install the proper font you will be able to read Greek! The post actually has a secret message in it…

    In linguistic terms it is really bad to describe as Chinese some text that is not easy to read, as Chinese is a well-described language and definetely has nothing to do with encoding problems. If you use Linux, you should be seeing boxes with four hex numbers in them. If you put the numbers in a sequence, you get the Unicode codepoint of the missing character.

  5. If you want a puppy that is fully compatible with the Greek language check pupEL and Happy linux.
    I use both, both at work and on my laptop, and I am fully satisfied. I have also added the Openoffice 3 sfs file in order to have a full office suite. But if you have less than 256 nb of ram you should stick with Abiword because openoffice needs some ram.

    http://thehamsters.synthasite.com/downloads.php

    http://hamster-linux.blogspot.com/

    Take a look at those beautiful distros! They worth it!

  6. Ξέρεις πῶς μποροῦμε νά γράφουμε πολυτονικό σέ PuppEL/Puppy;

  7. @Φούκας:
    Εξαρτάται από την έκδοση του X.Org που έχει το Puppy Linux που χρησιμοποιείς.
    Μπορείς να δεις το αρχείο
    /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/gr
    Αν αναφέρει στην πρώτη διάταξη («basic») τους χαρακτήρες του πολυτονικού, τότε ακολουθείς τις οδηγίες στο http://simos.info/blog/archives/886
    Μπορείς να βάλεις το παραπάνω αρχείο κάπου για να σου πώ περισσότερα για τις επιλογές σου.

  8. Τελικώς το πρόβλημα λύθηκε. Απλά επιλέγεις polytonic από το setup του πληκτρολογίου!

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