Nothing about Puppy Linux?
Puppy is my favorite way to introduce newcomers to Linux, or Knoppix, but I haven’t looked into Knoppix in several years.
The idea is a “live cd”. You pop it in, reboot and you’re looking at Linux. Shut down, pull the cd, and you’re back into windows, untouched. Now you can also use it on a USB drive, I’m not going to try it until I get another issue figured out. How to install a few favorite games...
I have a recent version I use on my win 7 laptop now and then, and on a used eMacines with a botched win 7 install. It looks like someone rebooted during a windows 10 “upgrade” and now win 7 is there but only the core OS. No system utilities work at all. Can’t run msconfig, regedit, any system tools.
So I keep a Puppy CD in it. Just downloaded Mint a few days ago, haven’t taken time to burn it to cd yet, too much else going on trying to recover from the ice storm. I think I have an extra hard drive I can use as a test platform, it’s not hard to swap it out. If not, I know where to find them.
Only thing about Puppy I’m not pleased with is it only has a couple of games, and I haven’t figured out how to install a few favorite arcade games and make them keep working so I can burn the result to cd.
That’s another nice feature, you can customize Linux all day long, then burn the results to a CD and you have your own custom install, tailored to your likes. I’ve seen custom builds tailored to education, science and astronomy. The astronomy one was good but I don’t think it’s being developed any more. Everything you could possibly want for an astronomy related OS, including software to attach a telescope to a laptop and take pictures through it. Want to know when the space station will be overhead in your area? It’s there...CLICK...want to see Jupiter’s red spot? Yep, software was included to tell you what night and time, just set your time zone.
Strange though, I built and repaired computers for a living for 15 years, never figured out much about Linux except to boot it up and use it. Didn’t want to though, I wanted to see if it was “ready for prime time”, so I approached it as a complete computer illiterate, can I use it with no knowledge of anything but point and click?
Yes, but Linux in general had a steep learning curve 15 years ago when Puppy was still a 120MB file that would fit on a mini cd. (Puppy and Knoppix were easy, but a full install of Mandrake, Debian or Red Hat was an eye opener)
Just using it and getting online was no big problem, getting dial up working was fairly painless. (no broadband when I first checked out Puppy). Ran like a scalded dog, Puppy would run on a 386 that would choke on windows 95. On a 233MMX, it just screamed. Ran circles around win98 on tbe exact same machine and left no changes whatsoever, except for a small swap file windows would ignore. On identical, brand new 1GHz computers I built myself, XP ran like a dog, while Mandrake 9, released not long after XP, would still run on a 233. XP required a 500 PIII to just stumble along. Kinda reminds me of biden compared to Trump...biden would be XP on a pentium 500, Trump would be Mandrake on the 233mmx, and still running circles around windows, on a machine half as fast with half the RAM. No, I’m not kidding. Mandrake 9 on a 233mmx with 256 mb ram outran XP on a 1GHz PIII with 512 ram.
I also had Mandrake 9 installed on a 1GHZ PIII machine. Identical to my XP machine, with minor hardware differences, Mandrake ran circles around XP and never slowed down a bit while I had to reinstall XP after 2 years because it was so sluggish. That’s because Linux has always had much better memory management. I still don’t know of a reliable way to kill Windows processes once the application that requires them is shut down. Linux does it automatically.
And there were also some other options, like Feather Linux, Damn Small Linux, and a couple of others, all very small, would fit on a mini cd except for Knoppix, and just worked great as a bootable cd. Puppy and Knoppix turned out to be my favorites. Damn Small was quite good too. Feather worked great, light and fast.
I can’t remember which others I tried. Didn’t like Ubuntu much. It ran good, just wasn’t the OS for me. Mandrake, later Mandriva, was my favorite full install. I used it up to Mandrake 10, very good.
CD? USB is much faster.
I just recently installed both “Wine” and “Play on Linux” in a Mint 20 cinnamon system. They work together and this set up worked great for Windows games a friend could not live without.
It sets up each game install into it’s own individual Windows Virtual Machine environment and adds a desk top Icon for you. It boots the VM and switches the hardware over for you to play that Windows game.
Each game requires it’s own install from source medium, the Play on Linux makes this much easier for you while using Wine as the base.