I just finished playing with Puppy Linux on my Dad's Acer Aspire 1690 laptop and was amazed at how well and effortless it ran. I had to download and burn a ~100MiB ISO which didn't take long. The CD was burnt as a multisession CD which Puppy can take advantage of later. After one wasted reboot through the agonizingly slow XP boot sequence, I changed the BIOS to boot first from the CD and let Puppy loose. The boot itself was in text mode and first asked me for special boot parameters, I just hit enter and hoped for the best. Then there was a long pause saying that pup_215.sfs was loading into tmpfs --- I thought the machine had locked up, but it hadn't and resumed its initial boot. Then came a textual dialogue for setting up the graphical screen; I selected the recommended Xorg set-up and all went well. The graphical screen than came up with shocking speed, and I was confronted with an immediately functional desktop. How weird.

And it was fast. Very fast. I've never experienced a computer running this fast before. After the long boot delay loading the tmpfs I wasn't expecting speed. Even with the delay of loading from the CD and the initial configuration getting to the desktop wasn't much longer than waiting for XP to boot. I wasn't yet connected to the internet as the house's WiFi uses an encrypted key, but Puppy's Wizards are even better than MS's and I was online in no time at all. It was all so effortless. It amazes me that a Linux kernel could run on this laptop with total functionality and no custom configuration at all. The Acer is about as generic as a laptop can be; nevertheless, it was an impressive feat --- almost magic --- a cold-reading --- Puppy rules!

I shut it down so I could set-up a permanent store, I had been running purely out of RAM up until this point; Puppy liked the two FAT32 partitions that the ACER was using under XP (strange that such a relatively young machine shouldn't be using NTFS but I can't complain) and offed to save all the state information up till that point. It gave me more options than I knew what to do with. Available locations were as an additional seesion on the CD, on either of the partitions of the hard drive, or on the USB key I had handy. I could only try one, so opted for the conservative choice and wrote my data onto a half-gig filesystem-in-a-file that Puppy created for me on the Acer's data partition.

I still had the CD in the drive and rebooted right back into Puppy. The boot was no faster the second time around, but knowing that loading the tmpfs would be slow I was prepared to wait a bit so I was taken by surprise at how quickly it then went to a fully functional graphical desktop. I haven't timed it, but it seemed to get from nothing to a productive desktop much faster XP. I have to leave the room waiting for XP to be usable. The fully installed XP looks usable much faster than the install-to RAM-at-every-run Puppy CD, but this is a deception. The XP desktop sits there for ages before you can do anything. Puppy lingers in text mode doing very little and then --BANG-- a graphical desktop and everything just works like lightning. Its almost spooky how fast this beast is.

Ejecting the OS from the CD was icing on the cake. Here I was running a fancy graphical operation system with no OS files in sight. I haven't done that trick since before hard drives became standard equipment in microcomputers.

The YouTube video was a jerky, but then the WiFi in this room really sucks and XP does no better. My debian machine can't play YouTube video all so I was pleased --- I intend to play with this capability more. Web browsing was good. The file manager is good. Even the games are good. Puppy Linux is thoroughly enjoyable.