Which Distribution cured your Distrohopping?
- Thread starter tinfoil-hat
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- desktop distrohopping
I distro-hopped for perhaps 6-7 months. I then found Puppy in early November of 2014, and.....well; that was it!
It worked well with my then-elderly hardware.....and it was a tinkerer's dream. (Which describes me to a tee.) On top of that, she's pretty much incorruptible, with those read-only files being copied into a virtual file-system running entirely in RAM at every boot.
Really & truly, if you naff-up your system files, it'll be your own doing....
Mike.
It worked well with my then-elderly hardware.....and it was a tinkerer's dream. (Which describes me to a tee.) On top of that, she's pretty much incorruptible, with those read-only files being copied into a virtual file-system running entirely in RAM at every boot.
Really & truly, if you naff-up your system files, it'll be your own doing....
Mike.
OP
tinfoil-hat
Active Member
never tried puppy, what files are loaded into RAM exactly?I distro-hopped for perhaps 6-7 months. I then found Puppy in early November of 2014, and.....well; that was it!
It worked well with my then-elderly hardware.....and it was a tinkerer's dream. (Which describes me to a tee.) On top of that, she's pretty much incorruptible, with those read-only files being copied into a virtual file-system running entirely in RAM at every boot.
Really & truly, if you naff-up your system files, it'll be your own doing....
Mike.
@tinfoil-hat :-
All Puppy's system files are packed in SFS format.....Squash File System. She's also put together in "modular" format.
What generally gets 'loaded' into RAM will be the main, 'base' Puppy SFS (this is Puppy proper). Then, there's vmlinuz - the kernel - along with its companion 'zdrv' (this is the kernel modules). These two are built together by Woof-CE's 'kernel-kit' script at Github, so if you swap kernels, these two are always swapped-out as a matching pair. And to tie everything together & make it all work properly there's the initrd.gz (the init system). This is something of a Puppy 'special'; based around Sysvinit, it's heavily modified to work with Puppy's aufs/overlayfs 'layering' file-system.
Newer Pups are now including an 'fdrv', as well.....this is firmware, to ensure your hardware all works as it should. Firmware used to be included in the Puppy 'base' SFS, but the decision was taken a few years ago to make this modular & 'swappable', as well.....because firmware is not only kernel -agnostic, it's also arch-agnostic, too, since the individual firmware files only contain data. This way, you can 'match' firmware to your specific hardware from a selection of available fdrv's.
These are the 'basics' for a functional Puppy. There's various other bits'n'bobs to make stuff function more effectively; mostly home-brewed & Puppy-specific, these will vary from Pup to Pup.
Mike.
Last edited:
OP
tinfoil-hat
Active Member
wow, thanks! didn't think puppy was this unique in comparison to other distros@tinfoil-hat :-
All Puppy's system files are packed in SFS format.....Squash File System. She's also put together in "modular" format.
What generally gets 'loaded' into RAM will be the main, 'base' Puppy SFS (this is Puppy proper). Then, there's vmlinuz - the kernel - along with its companion 'zdrv' (this is the kernel modules). These two are built together by Woof-CE's 'kernel-kit' script at Github, so if you swap kernels, these two are always swapped-out as a matching pair. And to tie everything together & make it all work properly there's the initrd.gz (the init system). This is something of a Puppy 'special'; based around Sysvinit, it's heavily modified to work with Puppy's aufs/overlayfs 'layering' file-system.
Newer Pups are now including an 'fdrv', as well.....this is firmware, to ensure your hardware all works as it should.
Mike.
OP
tinfoil-hat
Active Member
I'd like to hear the story behind it.
Why did you do this
What skillset did you have, when you started this project?
Did you do it (mostly) alone?
What did you learn on the way?
What were the hardest points, that made you get stuck?
What were your favourite tools that helped you build it?
How much of an timeconsumption does that mean for you in your daily live?
I guess I could come with tons of other questions, but those just came in mind
Why did you do this
What skillset did you have, when you started this project?
Did you do it (mostly) alone?
What did you learn on the way?
What were the hardest points, that made you get stuck?
What were your favourite tools that helped you build it?
How much of an timeconsumption does that mean for you in your daily live?
I guess I could come with tons of other questions, but those just came in mind
I remember in the old days of slackware ( 1993-94 timeframe ). You were basically downloading
filename.tar.gz files and extracting them. There was no dependency checking and no upgrade path.
Life was a lot simpler then. I wonder if Linus ever envisioned all the package managers and dependency hell we have today?
You can still download tar.gz and tar.bz2 files even today, as long as it's a simple stand alone application which doesn't require
any system libraries.
filename.tar.gz files and extracting them. There was no dependency checking and no upgrade path.
Life was a lot simpler then. I wonder if Linus ever envisioned all the package managers and dependency hell we have today?
You can still download tar.gz and tar.bz2 files even today, as long as it's a simple stand alone application which doesn't require
any system libraries.
OP
tinfoil-hat
Active Member
When I was in 8th grade, i made an intern in my cities it department, and from then on i wanted to be a sysadmin. I even was gifted an old server and be told to try linux at the time around. but my foolish child brain rather was interested in playing counterstrike ... if I had taken the other way, I might be creating something meaningful by now -.- at least i became a sysadmin. but by far no wizard. even if for some years until i got my disability checks. now it's downgraded to a hobby
wendy-lebaron
Active Member
debian "bullseye".
difficult to believe based on what i wrote earlier on this site. but arch linux this year has been just ugh. i have a somewhat broken endeavouros budgie that i will purge in a few weeks. because it has a misbehaving slow nemo. cannot record audio with audacity. cannot run appimage, complains about version of "mount". installed the latest version with "pacman" and it still stops suddenly after about a minute of recording audio. previously i had manjaro which i thought was better than debian. until one of my installations of manjaro mate was marked read-only unless i actually got into it.
cannot really try any rpm-based distribution. checked out pclinuxos kde. but i hate being taken away from terminal to install or update. now i have a limit for internet and cannot grab the iso. i wish i could. i'm not permitted to put fedora on my 12-year-old computer.
"bookworm" generally has been slow and memory greedy for me. i have it with mate desktop which is actually my daily driver and am on it right now. but it tells me "trixie" is going to ask for more memory and more processing power.
because my computer cannot really handle wayland, the doors are shutting on me. but i refuse to give up. recently i tried antix. but i hope installing pulseaudio could take me out of weak bass. it's the only thing i really want fixed. i also have mx linux "wildflower" with fluxbox. but becoming annoyed it's steadily lengthening the startup times.
i've also tried ubuntu studio "noble numbat". disappointed because it's slow. i tried to create program for qb64 phoenix edition programming system but it held for a long time building the main library for some reason. sometimes that was done when i wanted to create any program that uses images or music. ardour v8.4 for me would render only in real time, otherwise produced no sound whatsoever in any configuration on my side which made me hate it later than v6. that incredibly counterintuitive program worked well on any "bullseye" base i cared to try it in, although it's now two versions behind. i have to use qtractor appimage more often for clap and vst3 support and a few other things.
appreciated that the "new" ubuntu studio has kde plasma v5.27 with "x11" session. but i guess it's part of the performance problem which requires a faster computer with more ram.
two years ago i couldn't rely on debian because i had difficulties with the installer. kept failing at bootloader stage. but when i was finally able to break through, there was no turning back.
difficult to believe based on what i wrote earlier on this site. but arch linux this year has been just ugh. i have a somewhat broken endeavouros budgie that i will purge in a few weeks. because it has a misbehaving slow nemo. cannot record audio with audacity. cannot run appimage, complains about version of "mount". installed the latest version with "pacman" and it still stops suddenly after about a minute of recording audio. previously i had manjaro which i thought was better than debian. until one of my installations of manjaro mate was marked read-only unless i actually got into it.
cannot really try any rpm-based distribution. checked out pclinuxos kde. but i hate being taken away from terminal to install or update. now i have a limit for internet and cannot grab the iso. i wish i could. i'm not permitted to put fedora on my 12-year-old computer.
"bookworm" generally has been slow and memory greedy for me. i have it with mate desktop which is actually my daily driver and am on it right now. but it tells me "trixie" is going to ask for more memory and more processing power.
because my computer cannot really handle wayland, the doors are shutting on me. but i refuse to give up. recently i tried antix. but i hope installing pulseaudio could take me out of weak bass. it's the only thing i really want fixed. i also have mx linux "wildflower" with fluxbox. but becoming annoyed it's steadily lengthening the startup times.
i've also tried ubuntu studio "noble numbat". disappointed because it's slow. i tried to create program for qb64 phoenix edition programming system but it held for a long time building the main library for some reason. sometimes that was done when i wanted to create any program that uses images or music. ardour v8.4 for me would render only in real time, otherwise produced no sound whatsoever in any configuration on my side which made me hate it later than v6. that incredibly counterintuitive program worked well on any "bullseye" base i cared to try it in, although it's now two versions behind. i have to use qtractor appimage more often for clap and vst3 support and a few other things.
appreciated that the "new" ubuntu studio has kde plasma v5.27 with "x11" session. but i guess it's part of the performance problem which requires a faster computer with more ram.
two years ago i couldn't rely on debian because i had difficulties with the installer. kept failing at bootloader stage. but when i was finally able to break through, there was no turning back.
OP
tinfoil-hat
Active Member
Care to share your PC specs? Which country are you from?
Maybe you can get a held on an apt-mirror, if you have few chanses to get in the internet
The three distros I've stuck with and I use for daily drivers are Lubuntu and Xubuntu and Easy OS as they all work OOTB.
The best imo is Easy OS and reason being is I can totally eliminate any and all hard drives by booting into a run in ram mode only.
No hard drives to access so whatever the bad guys want to do they can't as there ain't no hard drive to write to.
If anything bad does happen then all I have to do is reboot my computer and a clean brand new fresh install at reboot every time.
The best imo is Easy OS and reason being is I can totally eliminate any and all hard drives by booting into a run in ram mode only.
No hard drives to access so whatever the bad guys want to do they can't as there ain't no hard drive to write to.
If anything bad does happen then all I have to do is reboot my computer and a clean brand new fresh install at reboot every time.
