I bought a used Netbook for my Linux box. I am thinking of going light and running Puppy. Is there any reason I should not? I had Ubuntu on my old one and was happy with that but Puppy seems so easy.

I suppose if you don't run Puppy he might become lazy and overweight and will trash your home, so I would say run Puppy and he will be happy.























Ooops sorry - I couldn't resist that one.

I have an old copy of Ubunta Netbook Mix. I like it but there is no upgrade. And I have an old copy of Puppy that I liked. As far as new, I am looking at Mint. It's a decent Netbook capable of handling it. I hear a lot of good things about Mint. I have one friend who is encouraging me to run with that because he says if he could start over on a new machine right now he would go with Mint. I think he just wants to live vicariously through me and fulfill his new Netbook fantasies. He could be right or he could be wrong. Of course, my mother thought my father was insane when he bought me a computer in 1981 because they were "THE WAY FOR THE FUTURE". Of course he brought home BETA over VHS originally because IT WAS SUPERIOR. And our original satellite dish had to get a permit and was about 12 feet across and I used to change channels just to watch the robotics move it around.

Lisa is awesome. Katya is Natty and Lisa is Oneiric. Lisa has Gnome 3 and Gnome 2.32. MATE has really improved on Gnome 2.32. The MSGE is cool. I am just learning about it. Lisa is LinuxMint 12. I first started with Mint 4. Mint is more than just a derivative of Ubuntu which is a derivative of Debian. I am hoping Clem will be working on a version of Lisa LXDE because I really like Katya LXDE. Katya is from Ubuntu 11.04 Natty and Lisa is from Ubuntu 11.10. I was having fun with Precise Pangolin which is still in Alpha1 stage since it is Ubuntu 12.04. So far no Mint from 12.04 Ubuntu. With the infinity symbol on the top left of the desktop on Lisa you can switch between Gnome 3 and Gnome 2. I just like the setup LXDE of Mint Katya but really haven't noticed that much speed difference in start up with Gnome 2 with MATE. Gnome 3 with MATE seems faster than Gnome 2. Just be sure to load your Romeo in Software Sources.

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)


In the past couple of years we've seen Linux Mint rise into the spotlight of the open-source community. The Mint team has gained a reputation of taking Ubuntu and making it more practical for end users. Part of this reputation comes from the useful Mint-specific applications which make backups, updates and other administrative tasks easier. Another part of the appeal to Mint is, no doubt, the project's willingness to include lots of functionality out of the box, offering codecs, Flash and various extras. I suspect they've also gained popularity from providing a classic desktop environment, which remains largely consistent across the project's various editions. The bottom line, in my experience at least, has been that Mint, in all of its editions, across most of its versions, has been solid, functional and user-friendly.

Having recently reviewed Mint's Debian edition it was tempting to simply write this review as, "Mint 12: Everything worked out of the box and they lived happily ever after." But that wouldn't be a useful nor honest way to write a review. Fortunately, there is something new and interesting in Mint 12: GNOME 3 with Mint extensions which are designed to make the GNOME 3 desktop function in a similar manner to GNOME 2. The MATE desktop, a continuation of the GNOME 2 desktop, is also included. Going into this review I decided to try running Mint 12 on the young Btrfs file system instead of the default ext4 file system to see what sort of difference, if any, it would make.


Installation

Linux Mint 12 is available as a 32-bit or 64-bit DVD. The project also provides builds on a CD which are stripped of certain multimedia codecs and applications. The CD edition is designed to be distributable in countries where software patents are a concern. Booting off the DVD we're brought to a GNOME 3 graphical desktop environment with some modifications. At the top of the screen we still find the GNOME Activities button and a system tray, but we also find an application menu and task switcher along the bottom of the display. We'll come back to the interface in a bit, but first let's look at Mint's installer.

The installer, which comes from its Ubuntu base, hasn't really changed recently. We go through the usual process of picking our preferred language, the installer confirms that our hardware meets the proper requirements and then we're given the chance to partition the disk. The partitioning section is, in my opinion, one of the better partitioning tools available. It's fairly smooth and intuitive and supports a wide range of Linux file systems. Once we're done on this screen the installer begins copying files in the background while we answer the remaining questions. We confirm our time zone and keyboard layout, and create a user account. We can also choose to enable auto-login and encryption of our home partition. If we accept the default settings we can get through the installer in just a few minutes.


On the desktop

Linux Mint comes with, effectively, three desktop environments, each of them a flavour of GNOME. The default environment is the GNOME 3 Shell with Mint extensions. What this gives us is basically the traditional Mint interface with task switcher and application menu at the bottom of the screen. The GNOME Activities menu is placed at the top of the screen. This means that the user can use the new GNOME Activities interface to switch between tasks and to launch applications and we can also use the classic application menu and task switcher as we did with GNOME 2. With Mint's extensions windows have minimize and maximize buttons and the user menu has an option to shut down the computer. The user also has the choice of turning off Mint's extensions so we can get back to a vanilla GNOME Shell experience or form our own custom desktop. It's a fairly flexible system which I found easy to customize. At first I found it a little strange to have two application menus and a third menu to logout/shutdown, but after a while I began to appreciate the duality. Once one becomes accustomed to having both the Mint menu and the Activities menu it means that we can move the mouse to whichever menu is closer. After half an hour I found the small reduction of desktop space was a fair trade for the speed and ease I had in accessing items.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20111219

what do you think of Lupu, the combination of Puppy and Lucid? I put it on a thumb drive for a bootable recovery thing and set my netbook to boot first from USB. I leave it like that and so long as nothing is in my USB ports normal boot into my windows 8 developers preview is very quick-like 12 seconds with the startups whittled to their core.
However,I'm having trouble configuring the WiFi component of Lupu. I can't seem to get the various drivers loaded for the various routers and it thus won't catch the internet. Any suggestions or input? I'd like to have my thumbdrive OS fully configured so I can play with my new Puppy.

I have been using linux mint 11 and ubuntu 11.10 at work. Mint on an old box with a p4 and Ubuntu 11.10 on a new dell laptop with a dual boot. Never used the windows side of the laptop just can't over write cuz it's not mine other wise it would all be ubuntu.

Linux Mint 11 works fine on old machines, read rainbow trout's responses. He has laid out some good comments.

As for puppy there are some new distros and I have tried them. They work supper! Puppy is where I got my start using linux. Laptop gave me tHis: "Windows not Found". Googled data recovery for my work laptop and after hours of searching for methods of recovery I found a small link that read something like' use linux to recovery data" So I read the info, downloaded and burnt the iso and got all my data by mounting the hard drive.

After that I found Ubuntu Hardy Heron and never went back to windows!

AND YOU KNOW WHAT IT'S FEAKING FREE!!!!!