[aklug] Puppy Linux 4.3.1 "Woof"

I've used Puppy off and on since 2.0 because I really admired the speed
and snap of the toram feature. What has prevented me from using it as my
mainline distro were several things: lack of security updates, the
package repo wasn't nearly as extensive as Debian or Ubuntu, and your
always logged in as root. With 4.3.1 Barry is back with a couple
projects before he finally pulls the plug with retirement, and one of
them is Woof. To quote from his blog <http://bkhome.org/woof/>:

    Rationale

Up until recently, Puppy had a build system called Puppy Unleashed,
which accessed a repository of PET packages and built a live-CD with
your choice of packages. There are various problems with this arrangement:

   1. PET packages are heavily cut-down binary packages. There is often
      a lot of work in creating a PET package as we trim out all the fat.
   2. Having a repository of PET binary packages means that we are also
      legally obliged to maintain a repository of the source packages.
   3. Upgrading all the core infrastructure packages, such as glibc,
      gcc, gtk, cups, ghostscript and the other system libraries and
      creating new PET packages and 'devx' file then getting it all to
      work, takes us a very long time.

In some earlier versions of Puppy we did use binary packages from
another distro. For example, the Puppy3 series is based on Slackware
binary packages. However, I did every step manually, creating each PET
package virtually file-by-file, and then spent several months getting it
right before a final release.

    Solution

For a long time I have dreamt of a "magical script" that could download
packages of some other distro, cut them right down to Puppy-size, then
build a Puppy Linux live-CD -- and do all of this totally automatically.

Finally free of front-line responsibility for managing the Puppy
project, I had time to pursue this dream. The result is Woof.

This is what Woof does:

   1. Download another distros packages, so we don't have to host them
      anywhere (although in some cases the distro may not have a
      suitable package so we still need some of our own PET packages).
   2. Totally automatially build a Puppy live-CD iso file, with your
      choice of packages.
   3. Totally automatically build the 'devx' SFS file (which is how
      Puppy provides support for C/C++/Vala/Genie/Fortran compiling).
   4. Support multiple distros.
   5. Easily upgrade to a new version.
   6. The end result is Puppy Linux

It's ongoing right now in 4.3.1 but their shooting for it to be a main
feature in 5.0. Still don't like being root all the time-it's saved me
from the dumb dumbs in the past... :) Merry christmas! Bob

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Received on Fri Dec 18 10:33:12 2009