The Puppy Linux Solution

I have a laptop in the kitchen that I use to look up recipes, catch up on feeds in my RSS reader (Google Reader), check the weather and do general web surfing. It's not a powerful computer at all being an ancient Dell Inspiron 4100 with in Intel Pentium III clocking at 1.2 GHz and 256 MB of RAM. While these were impressive specs when the laptop came out in 2001, they are quite wimpy by today's standards.

I initially tried to run Windows XP on the laptop, but waiting 15 minutes for the machine to boot up became hard to bear. Additionally, every task took forever to complete so I realized that, despite my very limited requirements, the laptop needed a more forgiving operating system. So, I then tried Windows 2000 which improved the performance of the laptop, but it still often took up to a minute just to launch a web browser.

It then occurred to me that a lightweight operating system would be ideal for my laptop. However, such an option was not available from Microsoft and nothing from Apple would run on a Dell laptop even if they had a solution. So, I decided to look to the Linux world and eventually found Puppy Linux.

Puppy Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution that has a very small footprint. The distribution is only 85 MB and can be run as a live-CD meaning that it can run from a CD-ROM drive instead of from the actual computer hard drive. This offers the convenience of trying Puppy Linux without modifying the resident operating system on the computer.

I downloaded the Puppy Linux distribution (version 4.1.2), burned the resulting .ISO file to a CD, and then inserted the CD into my kitchen laptop. I initially ran it from the CD and used the option to load the entire Puppy Linux operating system into RAM. Doing this required 128 MB of RAM, and my laptop had 256 MB which was plenty of room. The installation went very smoothly being composed of a number of wizards that stepped me through each step. Soon, I was greeted with the Puppy Linux desktop.

The interface was clean and similar in layout to Windows XP with a Menu button in the place of the Start button, and applications ran in a task bar. Clearly labeled icons on the desktop indicated which applications I should use to browse the filesytem, write a document, or browse the web.

Since the main use of my kitchen laptop is to surf the internet, I clicked the icon for the "browse" which launched SeaMonkey, the native web browser in Puppy Linux. It was clearly based on the same Mozilla source code that underlies Firefox, but it looked a couple of years out of date. At first, I was unable to get online, but I clicked the "setup" icon on the desktop, found the entry to marked "connect to the internet or intranet..." and configured my ethernet adaptor to use DHCP. This fixed the problem, and I was soon browsing the web using Seamonkey.

SeaMonkey did a good job of faithfully rendering web pages. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that it also played flash content on sites like YouTube and Hulu. However, the main benefit was that SeaMonkey (along with the overall operating system) ran extremely fast. Since a CPU can quickly access RAM, the operating system was very smooth and responsive. I launched some of the other native Puppy Linux like Abiword, the word processor, and it also ran well. I found that I could open multiple tabs in SeaMonkey and still achieve great performance.

Although SeaMonkey was a decent web browser, I yearned for the familiarity of Firefox. I used Puppy Linux's package manager, PETGet and found Firefox 2.0.0.7. This was not the very latest version of Firefox out in the wild, but it provided the classic Firefox look and feel. I found that Firefox ran as responsively as SeaMonkey, and I realized that I had found a great operating system for my old kitchen laptop.

Although my kitchen laptop is rarely turned off, I didn't want to have to configure DHCP and install Firefox in case I had to reboot the machine (which would wipe out RAM and force me to run the Live CD again). So, I formated the NTFS hard drive of the laptop into a Linux friendly ext3 format and installed Puppy Linux to the hard drive. This allowed me to enjoy the speed of Puppy Linux while maintaining the settings I liked despite the occassional shutdown of the laptop.

If anyone has an old PC that is used for light tasks like web browsing or word processing ,then I think that Puppy Linux is a great solution. It is fast, easy to learn, and has a wide variety of applications despite its small size.