Run With The Big Dogs On Chubby Puppy Linux

By: Rob Reilly
Thursday, October 20, 2005 12:16:54 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6048/1/

It's No Dog

Chubby Puppy Linux "fills out" the regular Puppy Linux release with the addition of the OpenOffice.org suite of applications. It's a full figured Linux version in a fast, lightweight liveCD package. It will put a little bite into that shaggy old retired desktop.

It loads completely into 128 MB of RAM and has most of the applications found in the Rottweiler-sized distros. Mozilla and the three main OpenOffice.org programs all show up on the desktop. Various mainstream file managers, graphics tools, Internet, and multimedia offerings appear under the Start button. And the programs run faster than many hard-disk based installations, even on older hardware.

The distribution's web page says that it is ideal for older hardware with limited resources. I thought it would be interesting to see how the liveCD worked on my aging 266-Mhz 256-MB RAM equipped PII Thinkpad. For a little variety, I also gave it a quick whirl on my fire-breathing HP Pavilion Athlon 64 notebook.

It has everything you'll need to get lots of work done on your computer. As you'll see, it's a good choice in many, but not all situations.

Since I was a dog in another life, please note that my bad puns are rendered with a certain amount of affection.

Putting On The Dog

The first thing to do is fetch the Chubby Puppy Linux .iso and put it on a CD. The version I used was 1.0.4 and the .iso file was 96.1 MB in size.

Don't forget to use the 'Burn CD Image' option under the Tools and CD menus, when using programs like K3B to put the .iso on the CD. I know that it's a silly reminder. Perhaps, this dog's memory isn't what it used to be.

After burning, put the CD in and boot the machine. It will go through its paces and in a minute or two, Linux will be running with the FVWM desktop.

On the Thinkpad, a window automatically appeared so I could select my screen resolution. I chose 768 x 1024 x 24 colors, hit OK and was then viewing the desktop on a nice, clean, high-resolution screen.

That pretty well wrapped up getting Chubby Puppy running on the Thinkpad. I went through a similar booting process on the Pavilion notebook.

Doing Some Tricks

On the old Thinkpad, Chubby Puppy detected the plug-in SMC 2632W 802.11b card without any trouble. However, it didn't configure an IP address from my network automatically. I had to go into Start, then Setup and use the Ethernet/network Wizard to tell Puppy to retrieve an IP. After that, Mozilla (and other network dependent programs) started normally.

Networking on the Pavilion notebook proved to be an exercise in frustration. The 10/100 wired Ethernet port connected fine to my router and the interface worked out of the box, er, doghouse. Connecting through a CAT 5 had me surfing in no time. However, I was unable to see or configure either Prism-based SMC 2632 card or a USB-connected DWL-122 adapter (on the Pavilion). Seeing as I had to use a Windows driver with ndiswrapper under SUSE 9.2, it's no real surprise that the on-board Broadcom BCM4306 chip wasn't detected, either.

One of the first things I did after boot up was to remove the CD from the CD tray. How about that? That's sure hard to do with other liveCD versions of Linux. Chubby Linux never missed it.

Next, I started Mozilla and applied the speed-up techniques for pipelining and so on. The page loading was noticeably better than what came standard. The bundled version of Mozilla was 1.8b2. Settings were retained, so the downloads were fast, even after a reboot.

I tried loading OpenOffice.org Writer while Mozilla was still running. As expected, it took about 30 seconds to get it going. Still not too bad, considering the horsepower of the old Thinkpad. Without Mozilla, Writer loaded in about half the time. The Writer version was 1.1.4.

You'll be glad to know that LinNeighborhood is bundled into Chubby, so hooking up to a Samba server or Windows machine is painless.

I mention that because if you are going to use a machine like this for work, you'll probably be going to a central server for documents. And, that's exactly what I did when I checked out OpenOffice.org Impress, using LinNeighborhood. My test presentation used a few slides and graphic moving along a path. It sat on one of my Samba servers. I mounted the remote share and downloaded the file to my /root directory. I then opened the file in Impress and clicked through the animation. I executed flawlessly. Using one of these setups for presentations might be just the ticket for presenters who worry about walking laptops.

The point of this is that Chubby Puppy Linux is small and fast, on old hardware. For wireless, low cost, possibly retired desktops and laptops, it is a good match.

New Dog, Old Tricks

Chubby Puppy packs in quite a few interesting programs, although it seems to be very geared toward operation as a client. That's to be expected, in such a small package. I didn't find Apache or a VNC server. I did see gtkftp, an ftp server, however.

Using PupGet (CPLinux's package manager under Start and Setup), I also managed to install tightvncserver. I was impressed that it ran so well from the old Thinkpad. Although not video capture quality, the cursor and screen paints were quite usable when viewed over the wireless link with my Pavilion notebook sporting tightvncviewer.

Gxine, the Gplayer CD player, and the ripperX CD song ripper rounded out the multimedia side of Chubby Puppy. After a little fiddling, I was able to watch a TV video stream from a Boston station (via the network), although I didn't have any sound. One hazard of older hardware is that some parts eventually give up the ghost. In the case of the Thinkpad, the audio chip quit a year or so ago. The video feed was smooth and didn't have any freeze-ups or skips.

The video on Gxine worked on the Pavilion notebook, without tweaking, when I played my "The Day The Earth Stood Still" DVD. There must be a problem with audio chip detection in Chubby, because sound didn't work on the Pavilion, either. No manner of fiddling with the mixer would get so much as a peep. I immediately booted the Pavilion into SUSE 9.2 Pro to find that video and audio both worked normally.

Bring The Dog Into The House

In spite of a couple of glitches, Chubby Puppy Linux is an impressive liveCD distribution. It has tools to help you surf the Web, produce documents, and manage your computer.

It's a small, fast package that I think you'll like.

And, how could you resist those big old puppy dog eyes on the opening splash page. Here boy...

Rob Reilly is a consultant, writer, and commentator who advises clients on business & technology projects. He is also a Contributing Editor for LinuxToday.com. Send him a note or visit his Web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~robreilly.