The Puppy strikes back
You might remember a disagreement that occurred between the One Laptop Per Child project and the Puppy Linux community. Offers of their ultra-light operating system from the latter were quietly but firmly rebuffed by the former on the grounds of their closeness with Red Hat, after which the leader of the OLPC project, Nicholas Negroponte, publicly complained about the “bloat” of Linux and the lack of just such a thin distro.
The current design from OLPC “sputters along”, according to MacWorld, running Red Hat’s Fedora Core community distro, but the Puppy just won’t take no for an answer. Distro originator Barry Kauler decided to test out his baby on a donated machine “remarkably similar” to the proposed OLPC hardware design - the actual hardware is, as yet, unavailable - and published the results on the distro’s homepage:
Puppy is designed for this kind of situation from the ground-up. Extremely fast, very small footprint, a full set of applications, limited writes to Flash to extend its life indefinitely. There are no compromises — if you have read commentary about the OLPC project from various sources, you would think that an operating system and applications squeezed into such a minimal system would be severely compromised. Not so.
With a 433 Mhz CPU you have to expect some delays, however with Puppy the responsiveness is mostly immediate. Everything happens in a fraction of a second, and it feels like a 2GHz CPU running XP. The big applications do, however, need a bit of time to load.
He also includes startup times for some common applications, including a speedy 12 seconds for Mozilla Seamonkey and 10 seconds for Inkscape SVG.
Desktop Linux has more.
June 5th, 2006 at 12:55 am
Yes, these April 2006 events about OLPC were incomprehensible to many. Puppy Linux and another distro, DamnSmallLinux, have been in the top 20 of distrowatch.com listing for a long time before April 2006, yet Negroponte suddenly complained about “Linux bloat”. So it sounded like there was a move to justify the entry of non-Linux OS to the project.
More recently, however, OLPC has opened its pages to the minimalist Linux distros - see this link: http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/Minimal_Linux_distros
But that happened two weeks after an outright deletion of the Puppy Linux page, which was recreated by a Mr/Ms “Dhbarr”: http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/PuppyLinux
The original Puppy Linux page at the OLPC wiki is here: http://www.ph-islands.net/puppy/olpc_post_april_24_2006.htm
June 5th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
I’m not sure I’d characterise the events as “incomprehensible” - more simple corporate chicanery. It looked to me like Red Hat, or rather OLPC on behalf of one of its main corporate sponsors, was simply protecting its investment.
Red Hat clearly wants the positive publicity stemming not just from being involved in the project as donors - a philanthropic halo - but also as providers of the operating system, showing off their technical prowess. PuppyLinux’s offer, even if potentially of great interest and suitability to the project, was a threat to that and therefore rebuffed by the project to avoid a potential conflict with Red Hat.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
The dhbarr in question, here. Actually, since I can’t do much to help out the OLPC project I just go in and add articles to the most-linked non-existant terms. On that day I seem to recall there were 5 or 6 links to PuppyLinux and no actual content, so I tried to summarize the PuppyLinux FAQ from a NPOV to get the ball rolling.
-Mr. dhbarr.