Run With The Big Dogs On Chubby Puppy Linux
New Dog, Old Tricks
Rob Reilly
Thursday, October 20, 2005 12:16:54 PM
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.
The Gimp is also available for download and doesn't come standard on the CD/iso. There are a host of other bit-mapped and vector graphics programs, like xpaint, mtPaint, the Dia vector editor, and a couple of screen capture programs. Click on Start then Graphics processing, to see what's there.
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.
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