Puppy linux saved my netbook in 2010 when my hdd failed and i was broke and jobless. I was able to use puppy on a usb drive to apply for jobs in a burgerking hotspot. So i always have a copy of puppy on my keychain thumbdrive since then
The biggest issue with older Intel Atom based netbooks, even if they are 64 bit, is the 2GB of RAM limit. Yes, you can do *basic* computer tasks. However, as soon as you open a modern browser and go to modern website you will exceed 2GB of RAM in an instant. You will be swapping nonstop. Linux is great, but it cant work miracles.
Also the screen size on a lot of netbooks is fairly non-standard at 1024x600, so many times buttons and other stuff will get cut off if they're at the bottom of a dialog box for example. Linux will allow you to drag windows around with a keyboard shortcut but it gets old real quick.
@@LeftoverBeefcake Thats 100% correct. Linux distros require a minimum of 720 pixels in height in their installers. I have installed several Linux distros on my Asus EEE PC and the only way I could was by knowing/guessing how many times I needed to hit tab to continue.
@@finkelmanaWhat distro requires 720px height? Debian's graphical installer to this day runs in 800x600 and also offers a standard CLI compatible with everything. You're talking nonsense.
@@ps5hasnogames55: I'd suspect it was a defect in the installer, failing to correctly determine the actual resolution (maybe or maybe not because of hardware shenanigans).
@@ps5hasnogames55 Why would someone else mention it and I agreed. We *BOTH* experienced it. Me many times. Oh and I just looked up three different distros. Oh look all three have on their websites minimum resolution requirements is 1024 x 768. I will say I did look up one more, Fedora, which is 800x600. Still, most modern distros require 1025x768. I will accept your apology now.
I'm glad to see Puppy Linux getting some love 😊 The reason why they opted to run everything as root is that the Puppy Linux filesystem is essentially not writable. Every change gets sent to the work file or folder. So even if some attackers were to get in the system, they wouldn't be able to severely modify the core. Weird, I know...
@@AndrewClement Not all Puppies are Debian based. People have done it to other distros. Basically it is a process of shrinking the OS down to what is needed and making the boot process do the layered file system
As a writer, I'm instantly thinking PORTABLE TYPEWRITER!!!!! That size is all sorts of awesome. All I need is a word processor and I'm good to go. I don't care if I have anything else on it. (See you at VCF East, Sean! :) )
Of course, put antiX and launch abiword and you are good to go 🙂 You could even go pure CLI for the full typewriter focus experience, the Jed text editor even emulates classic editors like wordstar. I think Dell also had a netbook class with an incredibly pleasant keyboard in a form factor very similar to this Vaio. Perhaps you could use something ARM or RISC-V based to give you a lot of battery time.
I used to work for a computer manufacturer and used to carry a USB in my pocket with all my software on it, and it was puppy's ability to do so much yet live in a USB stick that got me interested in Linux in the first place. At this point, my computer career is behind me so I don't really have much need for a live system now a days, but for some reason, whenever the Linux bug strikes, I think about Puppy. The bestest boy, who once lived in my pocket
Puppy is still my favourite truly mini distro, many years ago it turned a Celeron 450mhz Lifebook B series with 192mb ram into a capable modern laptop that went everywhere with me with a PCMCIA wifi card plugged in.
You could install AntiX instead which IMHO is Puppy Linux done right without the root thing and the dependency on those pets packages to get anything done. AntiX is paired down like Puppy but works like regular Debian.
Correct, it baffles me he went with Puppy when antiX was made for this... Puppy should be for running from usb with persistence but not actually installed.
@@JawadKhan-qn3lp I'd say that it is superb but it really depends on what you expect from using a computer. Due to the constrained resources so that it can run on really old and under powered hardware, there are no full featured desktop environments such as GNOME, KDE or even XFCE or bloated applications such as LibreOffice or Firefox by default. Everything is very scaled down so that it could theoretically run on a P2 with 128 MB of RAM. But if you know Puppy then it is essentially the same thing. Same application set, same choices of desktop managers, file managers, etc.
That little PC is so cute. I really wanted, and still want one. Especially the green one. Sony needs to release an updated model for fun. I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Great video.
I had Puppy Linux on a Dell Mini 9 netbook, but decided it was a bit of a nuisance, so switched to Debian 12 LXQT instead. Puppy Linux is fun as an experiment, but for actual use I find it really quirky.
when i worked as industrial electronics engineer on a big plant(2011-2014) my colleagues had a useless thin client with atom n270/1gb ram and no hdd/ssd. I installed puppy linux on a 2gb USB-Flash drive and thin client become from useless to usable:) Even 3g modem worked. It was a good machine for browsing internet and reading pdf documentation. Also we had a possibility to watch some movies or sitcom series at our lunch brake.
i have the same pc. It runs half-life 1, gta VC and can play dvd or downloaded videos up to 480p, runs OpenOffice or something lighter, you can read or write books. Verdict - still useful for some tasks, even in 2024.
To this day, after doing bring-up on custom hardware, the GMA500 still gives me stomach pains. This was from when Intel was pushing their half baked "low power" chipsets into devices, and boy was it horrible to bring up.
I too groaned when I heard GMA500. I had a netbook with a similar chipset. AFAIK the GMA500 never got much more than basic support in Linux. I imagine this would have performed better if it had the N270 (or whatever it was) that had real Intel graphics.
If I remember well, the GMA500 was called Poulsbo in Linux drivers and was based on an old PowerVR. (correct me if I'm wrong, but I had an old Asus EEE PC X101CH with this ''gpu'')
Puppy Linux was the first Linux distro I tried as a teenager, because it was one of the few distros that would fit on a single CD-ROM to live boot from.
For the graphics to work properly you need a special graphics driver. The graphics capability in the chipset was licensed and not made by Intel so required a special closed source Poulsbo driver. Some versions of Ubuntu at the time incorporated this blob. It allows smooth video playback at 720p but doesnt help much with games. Intel used to also supply a Linux driver from its website
@@JawadKhan-qn3lp Google Ubuntu Poulsbo GMA500 distro. Had tried to reply with some URLs a couple times but TH-cam seems to automatically delete replies with URLs in them
I really miss Sony Vaio laptops. I was obsessed with this one in the mid 2000s that was an ultrabook with a "slim dock" docking station that added the DVD drive and a bunch of other ports that resembled a fatter laptop of the era once slotted into it. Of course I couldn't afford it, but when I finally saw one in the wild I got really excited. It was cool to me then and even with all the thin and powerful tech we have now, its still a cool concept.
I adore Puppy so much! I have a tiny laptop from a Brazilian brand named Positivo, a MOBO S7, and it's almost as tiny as the one you showed in this video. Intel Atom processor, 2GB ram, 32GB SD card. It also came with Windows 7, but I put Puppy Linux on it and it runs better than I expected, I love it! I had low expectations, but it runs great! Boddhi Linux also runs really nicely on it too! I adore tiny computers, they have an unique charm to them!
I've been using Puppy linux for 8 years. I started using Linux 22 years ago. Puppylinux is really the best for me. No user, no pass, no hal, no rules, no pam, no sudo, no udisk, no pulse. . A breath of fresh air.
I remember puppy linux fondly. Used to use it for school work as carrying around a 2gb flash drive and just plugging into school computers meant I got to keep my work, as well as not be restricted by the schools website blocker. It was incredibly fast on those windows 2000 optiplexs.
I love that color. If Vaios weren't so expensive I would've been all over this back in the day. It's specced like a netbook, but it definitely wasn't priced like one. I had an Eee PC I was quite happy with, but the major drawback was the screen resolution (mine was the 7" model so it was only 800x480, many things wouldn't even fit without scaling tricks) so this would've been significantly better in that aspect.
Yes that's the Asus 701 eeepc which i still have. But its a good workhorse because of its actual physical RJ45 plug and Linux supported Atheros wifi. antiX still runs great in it.
Thumbs-up dude! I have the white version (slightly coveting orange now) with a 1.8" PATA ssd running a massively cut-down & hardened XP SP3 (remember nLite?). No browser, nothing internet-related, boots to desktop in under 20 seconds, shuts down in 5. Runs super smoothly with no popups, no updates, no spyware/telemetry etc. I still use it regularly to run the Waves software for my rgb Photonics photo-spectrometer which doesn't like 64-bit Windows.
(I haven't used Puppy but) Wouldn't the stuff like "save session to folder or file" lead to problems for older and non-technical users? Also, though it isn't as big a deal as one might expect, I'm not sure if giving old people root is the best move...
I used Puppy Linux when it *was* a standalone distro. What made it a win for me was the ability to use a CD to boot into RAM, and load installed applications from an external drive. So I got the most out of the limited storage *and* the experience wasn't much different than a boot-drive install. The big downside was the use of the busybox core utils. Busybox has many uses, but not in a userland daily driver environment.
Funny in 2009/2010 I could still watch TH-cam on our old family PC with Duron 1600 and 768MB DDR1 memory + Nvdia TNT2 64MB agp version , besides my then perfectly fine Athlon X2 build with 4GB DDR2 and Rd. HD 3870 512MB GDDR4 GPU, although up to only 720p (you needed at least HD 4850 1GB or HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5 for smooth 1080p in 2010). Time flies fast indeed...
Sure, but you also have to remember back then you were limited to 10 minutes (or less) videos at less than 720p resolution and you needed the Flash Player to watch anything. I used to love Flash when it was a nice lightweight delivery vehicle for animations and stuff, before Adobe bought it and bloated the heck out of it. :(
@@xgf122 Yes, you're right... I was trying to remember what video camera I was using back then... I think I had a Canon that used both VHS-C and SD-cards but didn't handle hi-def video, so I couldn't join the hi-def revolution yet. :P
@@xgf122 They still hadn't fully migrated from Flash to HTML5 in 2012-2013. Back then only some videos were available as HTML5 while a lot were Flash only. This was a bit of a problem on Athlon XP's which didn't have SSE2 but Flash Player on Linux started requiring SSE2 in 2012 My Intel Atom N270 (GMA 950) netbook ran 480p TH-cam without any problems back in the day. And locally on VLC etc. it could (and still can) play 720p videos without dropping frames
puppy linux got me through 5 years of having no windows computer. i ran it on a usb drive on old dead windows laptops that were at least 15 years old. after a while it stopped working, not sure why...
I was rocking a ThinkPad T41 in 2008 when I was in college. Man, that thing was running circles around more modern laptops once I installed Puppy Linux on it.
I more or less daily drive one of these in hot pink with antix linux. Mostly as a terminal client, but also use it to remote into a linux computer I have at home where I do my heavy lifting. Cool little machines, but the performance has always been bad. If only Sony would remake it in an ARM variant.
I just bought myself an i5 DELL Optiplex (used from 2015 or 16) for all my TV Streaming and gaming needs and I'm so happy with it. Installed Ubuntu on it, upgraded the ram to 16GB and it all cost me $100. I wish they still made these pocket-sized laptops I'd love to have a cheap tiny Linux PC for when I'm on the go!
For youtube playback on older hardware that doesn't have the VP8/VP9 or AVC1 decoders, try forcing the old h264 codec on your browser using something like the h264ify extention, it helped me alot go through university with a tired core2duo laptop
I have an EEPC701 with puppy-528 on it. Last I used it, it was entirely usable even with its 900MHz CPU. The EEPC701 came with a VGA connector and I could watch youtube videos on it well enough. The downfall was that I couldn't get newer browsers to work on it and eventually it became impossible to watch cat videos. BTW: Puppy works nice from an external 1T USB drive and you can shut off the loading into memory. This can result in a system that is slow but not too bad that also has absolutely everything you need on it.
You really must have used it at the very least a decade ago, probably more, as modern TH-cam is unusable on a superior CPU as shown here... You could play YT videos at like 360 or maybe even 480p on an old Atom in the early 2010s. Not anymore, of course.
@@BilisNegra I think the EEPC701 had some sort of GPU that helped with the video. I will have to fire it up some time and see if it can play a video. Remember it isn't only the CPU that matters.
@BilisNegra these Atom CPUs actually can run videos up to 720p mostly fine but not inside a web browser. I have an old EeePC running AntiX where I use SMTube to browse and play TH-cam videos up to 720p and it works alright for the most part. The trick is to stick with video encoded in h264 for which the GPUs in these machines have _some_ hardware acceleration support and use a capable video player such as VLC or mpv.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Oh, yeah, I've known about all of that using an external player for better performance for ages, and VLC was always the usual instance. Not convenient at all, but if that SMTube thingy allows you to actually browse, click and directly play instead of of having to copy and paste a link, that's a step forward. Not the full experience with your subscription feed and all but, well, it's something.
@@BilisNegra wrong, you still can. What op missed was switching to a proper distro like antiX. There are not many pure 32bit distros out there, but some still exist. You can still have Chromium and Firefox derivative browsers recently compiled for it, heck you could do it yourself if you go Gentoo and use another pc to compile everything with distcc or such. The EEPC701 may not be capable to reproduce higher than 480p, but that's the literal vertical resolution of its screen. You could even use plugins that just yt-dlp and pipe the stream into mplayer or vlc and it works great.
I started using Linux full time 22 years ago. I've been using Puppy linux for the last 8 years. It's wonderful, and I can install anything I want. appimages flatpack, SFS, play-on-linux, wine, etc. . .
230MB for a light weight GUI experience is a fantastic and for comparison to a desktop install of debian headless with only SSH running on it consumes a mere 86MB.
I expect Haiku will actually run better than Puppy Linux. Haiku still supports running even on a Pentium II (although it recommends at least a Pentium 4)
I love it's physical form to bits. MANY BITS. If you could change out the components inside I would pay for that. That keyboard is possible to code with
At first I thought "I've never heard of an Intel Adam CPU before"? - come to [10:17] when the debian bookworm build was installing I saw "Atom"! ..dzzzzzhhh duh!
A lot of my experience with Puppy Linux was back in the netbook days, running it on an Eee 901 after trying out things like Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and so on. I love so many of the designs from Sony's VAIO line, but just because they could design and build it doesn't mean they should.
I put puppy on an old Acer U123 (1ghz atom, 2gb RAM, and a mechanical drive,) and it ran flawlessly. The ui isn't my favorite and the run-in-RAM system was annoying, but boy does that OS run on anything!
I have the same laptop Sony vaio , mostly same specs 2g ram, 232g storage just not the mini version . It originally came with vista....over the years i had Xp then win7 on it. At some point i bought another laptop and forgot about the Vaio for atleast 8 yrs. Last month after watching a youtube video i decided to install tiny10 32bit, i was blown away that it works like a new laptop. I have use it everyday since. I suggest u give it ago.
If you want to push this palmtop to a new level, try Small Damn Linux 2024. It was redone from the ground up, and still maintains it's small footprint.
Had to scroll way too far down through the comments to see this. Damn Small Linux was my favorite Linux outside of SuSE before I switched my main OS to OS X.
@@alexandrecouture2462 Yep. The info popped up in my news feed one day and I read the story on how it was redone with a modern kernel and had excess code stripped away. I have it installed on one of my Asus netbooks, and so far, it's worked great.
This would be super cool is the screen opened the way it does, but then folds flat onto the keyboard so you have a touchscreen and maybe joysticks, then build in cellular for on the go use. Would be an awesome pocket computer. I love the color too!
i think they're doing that because any changes will be deleted anyway when you reboot, unless you explicitly save them. And having a default user to the RAM disk is exactly as safe as running everything as root from an infosec perspective.
Most Puppy files and installed software are in a special folder, almost anything else in the root is read-only and the system runs in ram, so Puppy is one of the safest distros out there.
Give Antix a try - It's also uses about +- 200Mb RAM on boot and most of the applications arevery lightweight. Alternatively, a new version of DSL (Dam small linux) was recently released, which might give it a bit more juice.
I once put Puppy Linux on a USB stick and, even for a Linux noob like me it was nice and easy. :) I'll need a temporary Linux for some tests and this might be just the thing. And yes, it runs on potatos ;)
I had fun fiddling around with Ubuntu based Puppy Linux back in like 2016. I wanted to see if I could run it from RAM, download and install VirtualBox and a virtual machine. It was slightly trickier than i thought, mostly because of RAM constraints (I had 4GB RAM at the time), but i actually got a VM up and running! All in RAM 👍 Sure it kinda felt like a dead end experiment when i ultimately ended the day by turning the system off and losing the whole setup (I never had any good luck with that save data/session thing), but it was fun just to see Puppy hosting a VM in RAM.
funfact: older models don't have the trackpad thing, a smaller 2100mAh battery and well it came with vista. some stuff is diff too, like the memory slot placement + wireless switch placement.
Will run VLC though, and so long as you only play VGA quality it will work well enough. Firefox will work better, though you likely will be stuck with older versions, due to only having 32 bit support.
Btw, watching TH-cam works perfectly in VLC even on a Atom N270 with half the power of the Z560. You have to install a TH-cam-Plugin in VLC and advice your browser to open videos in VLC. Using that even today to watch TH-cam on my N270, at least up to 720p. As the EEE901 only has a 600p screen I usually use 480p and safe some battery. With my HUGE replacement battery my old EEE901 is able to run videos for around eight hours.
I got Puppy running on an ancient IBM Thinkpad T41, and everything functions except for not being able to figure out how to download video drivers onto the thing. The drivers for the old ATI Mobility Radeon chip do apparently exist, though!
one reason why classicube probably ran slow: Intel GMA 500 seems to be PowerVR based which isn't supported by the intel GPU linux drivers at all. You were probably running standard VESA drivers.
i think with the technology of today, with all these portable windows gaming machines coming out every other month, some company can release one of these computers and being very functional for modern use
Old micro PCs are best used as thin clients, with a window manager such as fluxbox which will only use 6-9MB of RAM. Or use it as a ssh/vim remote development environment. Or both at the same time, lol. 3D performance would have been better if you stuck with Ubuntu Bionic based Puppy as the 3D drivers for those old Atoms was removed from MESA libGLX drivers a few years ago, and you were running in software-rendered mode.
Wow Action Retro this Puppy Linux video is Amazing It's really good to see you use such a masterpiece of Lightweight Distros hope you can Try Antic because its also Very lightweight And Its Supports installing form the Hard drive too
Still have mine. Best form factor (for a laptop) I've ever owned. If only the performance had been there. Would kill for a comeback with modern hardware (and an ultrawide “retina” display).
Intel Atom Z550 @ 2 GHz, 2 GB DDR2 I think Puppy Xenial would have worked on that, It's recommended requirements were 1GB of Ram and a 1700 Mhz CPU if I recall right. I had it running on this small Dell netbook that came with Windows XP and was also an Atom CPU, that thing sucked with Wndows but worked well with that version of Linux man! 😊
I've always liked the form factor of the Vaio. Something similar to that but not underpowered would be nice for a write/surf/media computer. I don't really need a full computer for that, but preferably something more than a mobile phone or a tablet. And I need a pretty good keyboard. Today I use a Gemini PDA but I'd like it to be a little bit bigger.
On puppy linux you can actually change the desktop resolution so your intel GMA can run the game better (tho probably it would stretch the graphics unless configured on drivers to not do it), and i would suggest 800x600 for minecraft at this hardware, or if you can 640x480, and optfine on 1.2.5 minecraft or 1.5.2
A tiny machine like that with modern hardware like iPads and MS Touch laptops COULD be a very capable machine, and easily carryable for small common tasks. I like the idea.
Puppy linux saved my netbook in 2010 when my hdd failed and i was broke and jobless. I was able to use puppy on a usb drive to apply for jobs in a burgerking hotspot. So i always have a copy of puppy on my keychain thumbdrive since then
That's awesome.
Awesome story going tell my family. Kudos to you for intelligence and motivation. I hope things are better now.
Man, I would kill for a relatively modern laptop with a form factor like that.
Same. I wish there were more netbooks available today like there were then. Low watt CPUs have come a LONG way.
Modern low power CPUs are actually impressive, and with M.2, it would be SO easy to go that size.
Flood GPD's contact channels.
@@magfal they make toys, not useful machines.
@@alexcrouseno? They have the consoles for sure but they also have proper netbooks
All the algo knew was that you were on a weird version of Linux, and it figured mail order brides were appropriate
"You're sniffing network traffic? Wanna do some human trafficking??"
Average Linux user demographic
He made the mistake of choosing an out-of-support Ubuntu base. You should at least run a 22.04 base, of which is available on the Puppy Linux website.
hi hans reiser
I ordered singles from overseas.
I got 64 slices of American cheese.
The biggest issue with older Intel Atom based netbooks, even if they are 64 bit, is the 2GB of RAM limit. Yes, you can do *basic* computer tasks. However, as soon as you open a modern browser and go to modern website you will exceed 2GB of RAM in an instant. You will be swapping nonstop. Linux is great, but it cant work miracles.
Also the screen size on a lot of netbooks is fairly non-standard at 1024x600, so many times buttons and other stuff will get cut off if they're at the bottom of a dialog box for example. Linux will allow you to drag windows around with a keyboard shortcut but it gets old real quick.
@@LeftoverBeefcake Thats 100% correct. Linux distros require a minimum of 720 pixels in height in their installers. I have installed several Linux distros on my Asus EEE PC and the only way I could was by knowing/guessing how many times I needed to hit tab to continue.
@@finkelmanaWhat distro requires 720px height? Debian's graphical installer to this day runs in 800x600 and also offers a standard CLI compatible with everything. You're talking nonsense.
@@ps5hasnogames55: I'd suspect it was a defect in the installer, failing to correctly determine the actual resolution (maybe or maybe not because of hardware shenanigans).
@@ps5hasnogames55 Why would someone else mention it and I agreed. We *BOTH* experienced it. Me many times. Oh and I just looked up three different distros. Oh look all three have on their websites minimum resolution requirements is 1024 x 768. I will say I did look up one more, Fedora, which is 800x600. Still, most modern distros require 1025x768. I will accept your apology now.
I want a tiny orange laptop now. Not because it's useful or even usable, but it looks cool. Plus nobody would attempt to steal it.
yeah... nobody... at all... like never... ever...why are you lookng at me like that?
Orange
😂🤣😂
I have the white model (older one without the trackpad stuff)
You are wrong, I'll steal it because of how good it looks
ill steal it because you are testing my thug shake
I'm glad to see Puppy Linux getting some love 😊
The reason why they opted to run everything as root is that the Puppy Linux filesystem is essentially not writable. Every change gets sent to the work file or folder. So even if some attackers were to get in the system, they wouldn't be able to severely modify the core. Weird, I know...
Being persistent like that is usually not too big a concern for most of the malware actively being spread anyway.
This must be the same as Debian.
@@Forrest_O. Puppy is Debian based. If that is what you mean
@@AndrewClement Not all Puppies are Debian based. People have done it to other distros. Basically it is a process of shrinking the OS down to what is needed and making the boot process do the layered file system
@@kensmith5694 I didn't know that. Thank you!
As a writer, I'm instantly thinking PORTABLE TYPEWRITER!!!!! That size is all sorts of awesome. All I need is a word processor and I'm good to go. I don't care if I have anything else on it. (See you at VCF East, Sean! :) )
Of course, put antiX and launch abiword and you are good to go 🙂 You could even go pure CLI for the full typewriter focus experience, the Jed text editor even emulates classic editors like wordstar. I think Dell also had a netbook class with an incredibly pleasant keyboard in a form factor very similar to this Vaio. Perhaps you could use something ARM or RISC-V based to give you a lot of battery time.
I own it and I used it exactly for that use case for years.
You can consider buying modern netbook like Asus E410MA
Whoops I mean Asus E210MA
What battery life could you get on this thing with a super light linux distribution?
I used to work for a computer manufacturer and used to carry a USB in my pocket with all my software on it, and it was puppy's ability to do so much yet live in a USB stick that got me interested in Linux in the first place.
At this point, my computer career is behind me so I don't really have much need for a live system now a days, but for some reason, whenever the Linux bug strikes, I think about Puppy. The bestest boy, who once lived in my pocket
Ooooh international orange
Prison jumpsuit orange*
Organic Carrot orange*
Puppy is still my favourite truly mini distro, many years ago it turned a Celeron 450mhz Lifebook B series with 192mb ram into a capable modern laptop that went everywhere with me with a PCMCIA wifi card plugged in.
You could install AntiX instead which IMHO is Puppy Linux done right without the root thing and the dependency on those pets packages to get anything done. AntiX is paired down like Puppy but works like regular Debian.
AntiX is a good shout. Damn Small Linux 2024 is based on AntiX but is a damn sight smaller. I would try Void or Alpine personally.
Correct, it baffles me he went with Puppy when antiX was made for this... Puppy should be for running from usb with persistence but not actually installed.
whats the user experience like for antiX in ur experience? wondering if its worth messing around with
@@JawadKhan-qn3lp I'd say that it is superb but it really depends on what you expect from using a computer. Due to the constrained resources so that it can run on really old and under powered hardware, there are no full featured desktop environments such as GNOME, KDE or even XFCE or bloated applications such as LibreOffice or Firefox by default. Everything is very scaled down so that it could theoretically run on a P2 with 128 MB of RAM.
But if you know Puppy then it is essentially the same thing. Same application set, same choices of desktop managers, file managers, etc.
AntiX is definitely the way to go if you have an older cpu and limited memory.
That little PC is so cute. I really wanted, and still want one. Especially the green one. Sony needs to release an updated model for fun. I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Great video.
awful tiny laptops are AWESOME
Crossover episode when?
11:15 That sponsored ad on the top right of the webpage though.. 😂😂
Least inappropriate TH-cam ad:
frrrr! I have personalized ads off so I get those "lgbt gay test" ads and "hot singles nearby" ads when I turn off my ad blocker 💀@@atemoc
omg... I was so focused on the TDNC video, I didn't even _notice_ what ad was showing up there! 😆
Sure, Puppy Linux runs fast on a tiny Sony Vaio. But will it also find you Asian singles overseas???
This is exactly how I got into Linux. A vaio was used on my family TV to play videos and teenager me tried to boot Linux on it. :3
Good ol' Puppy Linux. Used to be really into it back in the day, perhaps I'd look at running it if I ever find a cheap netbook somewhere.
I had Puppy Linux on a Dell Mini 9 netbook, but decided it was a bit of a nuisance, so switched to Debian 12 LXQT instead.
Puppy Linux is fun as an experiment, but for actual use I find it really quirky.
when i worked as industrial electronics engineer on a big plant(2011-2014) my colleagues had a useless thin client with atom n270/1gb ram and no hdd/ssd. I installed puppy linux on a 2gb USB-Flash drive and thin client become from useless to usable:) Even 3g modem worked. It was a good machine for browsing internet and reading pdf documentation. Also we had a possibility to watch some movies or sitcom series at our lunch brake.
i have the same pc. It runs half-life 1, gta VC and can play dvd or downloaded videos up to 480p, runs OpenOffice or something lighter, you can read or write books. Verdict - still useful for some tasks, even in 2024.
To this day, after doing bring-up on custom hardware, the GMA500 still gives me stomach pains. This was from when Intel was pushing their half baked "low power" chipsets into devices, and boy was it horrible to bring up.
I too groaned when I heard GMA500. I had a netbook with a similar chipset. AFAIK the GMA500 never got much more than basic support in Linux. I imagine this would have performed better if it had the N270 (or whatever it was) that had real Intel graphics.
If I remember well, the GMA500 was called Poulsbo in Linux drivers and was based on an old PowerVR. (correct me if I'm wrong, but I had an old Asus EEE PC X101CH with this ''gpu'')
@@alexandrecouture2462 correct. This whole chipset was cursed.
This device was ahead of its time,
if only Sony had re-released it with the current amd ryzen processor.
it's possible, but no one have the batteries or thermal design to support such a thing.
Agreed.
Has anyone tried stuffing a broken phone or tablet into an old laptop case and running adapters for the peripherals ?
Heck, with even lower-end modern smartphone hardware, you could make a useable netbook in this form factor.
@@SilverSpoon_ If the Steam Deck can pull it off, a little goober laptop like this totally could.
Puppy Linux was the first Linux distro I tried as a teenager, because it was one of the few distros that would fit on a single CD-ROM to live boot from.
For the graphics to work properly you need a special graphics driver. The graphics capability in the chipset was licensed and not made by Intel so required a special closed source Poulsbo driver. Some versions of Ubuntu at the time incorporated this blob. It allows smooth video playback at 720p but doesnt help much with games. Intel used to also supply a Linux driver from its website
yo any idea about where to find more info on the driver? i looked on the arch wiki and did a quick google search but no dice :/
@@JawadKhan-qn3lp Google Ubuntu Poulsbo GMA500 distro. Had tried to reply with some URLs a couple times but TH-cam seems to automatically delete replies with URLs in them
Puppy Linux is my goto distro on all of my computers. Love it!!!!
It looks so modern yet so retro. Tecnology never went ahead since early 2000.
What...
Sony vaios have a slick design. Too bad they don't make em anymore.
I really miss Sony Vaio laptops. I was obsessed with this one in the mid 2000s that was an ultrabook with a "slim dock" docking station that added the DVD drive and a bunch of other ports that resembled a fatter laptop of the era once slotted into it. Of course I couldn't afford it, but when I finally saw one in the wild I got really excited. It was cool to me then and even with all the thin and powerful tech we have now, its still a cool concept.
i love orange
Thanks
I adore Puppy so much! I have a tiny laptop from a Brazilian brand named Positivo, a MOBO S7, and it's almost as tiny as the one you showed in this video. Intel Atom processor, 2GB ram, 32GB SD card. It also came with Windows 7, but I put Puppy Linux on it and it runs better than I expected, I love it! I had low expectations, but it runs great! Boddhi Linux also runs really nicely on it too! I adore tiny computers, they have an unique charm to them!
I've been using Puppy linux for 8 years. I started using Linux 22 years ago. Puppylinux is really the best for me. No user, no pass, no hal, no rules, no pam, no sudo, no udisk, no pulse. . A breath of fresh air.
As a fan of netbooks ever since, I am drooling for this thing!
Puppy Linux was a fun experience to me too.
I remember puppy linux fondly. Used to use it for school work as carrying around a 2gb flash drive and just plugging into school computers meant I got to keep my work, as well as not be restricted by the schools website blocker. It was incredibly fast on those windows 2000 optiplexs.
We use to just make admin accounts lol but dang wish I thought of a bootablr linux drive in the early 2000's for HS
was doing this in the mid 2010s,sysadmins never learn huh
I love that color. If Vaios weren't so expensive I would've been all over this back in the day. It's specced like a netbook, but it definitely wasn't priced like one.
I had an Eee PC I was quite happy with, but the major drawback was the screen resolution (mine was the 7" model so it was only 800x480, many things wouldn't even fit without scaling tricks) so this would've been significantly better in that aspect.
Yes that's the Asus 701 eeepc which i still have. But its a good workhorse because of its actual physical RJ45 plug and Linux supported Atheros wifi. antiX still runs great in it.
Thumbs-up dude! I have the white version (slightly coveting orange now) with a 1.8" PATA ssd running a massively cut-down & hardened XP SP3 (remember nLite?). No browser, nothing internet-related, boots to desktop in under 20 seconds, shuts down in 5. Runs super smoothly with no popups, no updates, no spyware/telemetry etc. I still use it regularly to run the Waves software for my rgb Photonics photo-spectrometer which doesn't like 64-bit Windows.
12 year old me would have given up all his pocket money for life for ever for one of these
This is totally giving me ideas for an old old netbook I have
Thank you
Finally a video about Puppy Linux. Perfect Linux for old people with old computers.
(I haven't used Puppy but) Wouldn't the stuff like "save session to folder or file" lead to problems for older and non-technical users? Also, though it isn't as big a deal as one might expect, I'm not sure if giving old people root is the best move...
@@zombie_pigdragon its the wrong choice, a proper distro like antiX would do much better for old PCs.
I used Puppy Linux when it *was* a standalone distro. What made it a win for me was the ability to use a CD to boot into RAM, and load installed applications from an external drive. So I got the most out of the limited storage *and* the experience wasn't much different than a boot-drive install.
The big downside was the use of the busybox core utils. Busybox has many uses, but not in a userland daily driver environment.
You can upgrade the busybox if you want. I like to use "Strings" which is not in the newer versions of Puppylinux.
Funny in 2009/2010 I could still watch TH-cam on our old family PC with Duron 1600 and 768MB DDR1 memory + Nvdia TNT2 64MB agp version , besides my then perfectly fine Athlon X2 build with 4GB DDR2 and Rd. HD 3870 512MB GDDR4 GPU, although up to only 720p (you needed at least HD 4850 1GB or HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5 for smooth 1080p in 2010). Time flies fast indeed...
The tubes have changed their encoding methods, a bit less data but a whole lot more CPU horsepower needed to decide.
Sure, but you also have to remember back then you were limited to 10 minutes (or less) videos at less than 720p resolution and you needed the Flash Player to watch anything. I used to love Flash when it was a nice lightweight delivery vehicle for animations and stuff, before Adobe bought it and bloated the heck out of it. :(
@@LeftoverBeefcake yes I remember, also in 2010 1080p became pretty much standard here. In 2012 they fully migrated from Flashplayer to HTML5
@@xgf122 Yes, you're right... I was trying to remember what video camera I was using back then... I think I had a Canon that used both VHS-C and SD-cards but didn't handle hi-def video, so I couldn't join the hi-def revolution yet. :P
@@xgf122 They still hadn't fully migrated from Flash to HTML5 in 2012-2013. Back then only some videos were available as HTML5 while a lot were Flash only. This was a bit of a problem on Athlon XP's which didn't have SSE2 but Flash Player on Linux started requiring SSE2 in 2012
My Intel Atom N270 (GMA 950) netbook ran 480p TH-cam without any problems back in the day. And locally on VLC etc. it could (and still can) play 720p videos without dropping frames
puppy linux got me through 5 years of having no windows computer. i ran it on a usb drive on old dead windows laptops that were at least 15 years old. after a while it stopped working, not sure why...
So if the puppies are making Linux, then what are the kitties doing? 😂
BSD
Kitty MacOS
laying on the keyboard, slowing down progress.
AROS
Uwuntu
This is making me want to get puppy Linux for my 2015 MacBook Air
Fun video, love the puppy linux idea.
I used to repurpose a lot of old Wyse thin clients by putting Puppy Linux on them. Such a cool little Distro.
god i always wanted one of these just for the form factor. would still love one today for typing stuff on using a reasonably usable OS
I was rocking a ThinkPad T41 in 2008 when I was in college. Man, that thing was running circles around more modern laptops once I installed Puppy Linux on it.
I more or less daily drive one of these in hot pink with antix linux. Mostly as a terminal client, but also use it to remote into a linux computer I have at home where I do my heavy lifting. Cool little machines, but the performance has always been bad. If only Sony would remake it in an ARM variant.
I just bought myself an i5 DELL Optiplex (used from 2015 or 16) for all my TV Streaming and gaming needs and I'm so happy with it. Installed Ubuntu on it, upgraded the ram to 16GB and it all cost me $100. I wish they still made these pocket-sized laptops I'd love to have a cheap tiny Linux PC for when I'm on the go!
this is how we get the year of the linux desktop... slowly and with old hardware!
This is neat, quite cool to run Linux on a Vaio notebook.
Puppy is pretty cool. I didn't know they would continue to support it after all this time. I had a buddy that recommended it to me many years ago.
Love puppy linux. Great for smaller or older machines
Dude I remember this small laptop craze. It was like netbooks and stuff, super cool I wanted one so bad for coding and stuff in college.
This device's form factor would be INCREDBILE with a modern low-wattage APU like what's in the Steam Deck!
would be a literal dream come true. hope gdp or MNT or some other manufacturer is taking notes...
For youtube playback on older hardware that doesn't have the VP8/VP9 or AVC1 decoders, try forcing the old h264 codec on your browser using something like the h264ify extention, it helped me alot go through university with a tired core2duo laptop
I have an EEPC701 with puppy-528 on it. Last I used it, it was entirely usable even with its 900MHz CPU.
The EEPC701 came with a VGA connector and I could watch youtube videos on it well enough.
The downfall was that I couldn't get newer browsers to work on it and eventually it became impossible to watch cat videos.
BTW: Puppy works nice from an external 1T USB drive and you can shut off the loading into memory. This can result in a system that is slow but not too bad that also has absolutely everything you need on it.
You really must have used it at the very least a decade ago, probably more, as modern TH-cam is unusable on a superior CPU as shown here... You could play YT videos at like 360 or maybe even 480p on an old Atom in the early 2010s. Not anymore, of course.
@@BilisNegra I think the EEPC701 had some sort of GPU that helped with the video. I will have to fire it up some time and see if it can play a video. Remember it isn't only the CPU that matters.
@BilisNegra these Atom CPUs actually can run videos up to 720p mostly fine but not inside a web browser. I have an old EeePC running AntiX where I use SMTube to browse and play TH-cam videos up to 720p and it works alright for the most part. The trick is to stick with video encoded in h264 for which the GPUs in these machines have _some_ hardware acceleration support and use a capable video player such as VLC or mpv.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Oh, yeah, I've known about all of that using an external player for better performance for ages, and VLC was always the usual instance. Not convenient at all, but if that SMTube thingy allows you to actually browse, click and directly play instead of of having to copy and paste a link, that's a step forward. Not the full experience with your subscription feed and all but, well, it's something.
@@BilisNegra wrong, you still can. What op missed was switching to a proper distro like antiX. There are not many pure 32bit distros out there, but some still exist. You can still have Chromium and Firefox derivative browsers recently compiled for it, heck you could do it yourself if you go Gentoo and use another pc to compile everything with distcc or such. The EEPC701 may not be capable to reproduce higher than 480p, but that's the literal vertical resolution of its screen. You could even use plugins that just yt-dlp and pipe the stream into mplayer or vlc and it works great.
I havent seen anyone talk about puppy linux in years, this is cool!
I started using Linux full time 22 years ago. I've been using Puppy linux for the last 8 years. It's wonderful, and I can install anything I want. appimages flatpack, SFS, play-on-linux, wine, etc. . .
In Firefox I like to use h264ify to play TH-cam videos on my old Mouse laptop from Japan. It helps heaps with older GPUs that can't grok h265!
230MB for a light weight GUI experience is a fantastic and for comparison to a desktop install of debian headless with only SSH running on it consumes a mere 86MB.
I expect Haiku will actually run better than Puppy Linux. Haiku still supports running even on a Pentium II (although it recommends at least a Pentium 4)
I used BeOS for about a year until I got another computer, a pentium 4.
I love it's physical form to bits. MANY BITS.
If you could change out the components inside I would pay for that. That keyboard is possible to code with
Great aesthetic at least. I want it for the color.
At first I thought "I've never heard of an Intel Adam CPU before"? - come to [10:17] when the debian bookworm build was installing I saw "Atom"! ..dzzzzzhhh duh!
Would love to see something like this redone with a modern ARM board.
A lot of my experience with Puppy Linux was back in the netbook days, running it on an Eee 901 after trying out things like Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and so on.
I love so many of the designs from Sony's VAIO line, but just because they could design and build it doesn't mean they should.
I put puppy on an old Acer U123 (1ghz atom, 2gb RAM, and a mechanical drive,) and it ran flawlessly. The ui isn't my favorite and the run-in-RAM system was annoying, but boy does that OS run on anything!
The slowest thing I've used Puppy on was a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB RAM in the late 2000s
I have the same laptop Sony vaio , mostly same specs 2g ram, 232g storage just not the mini version . It originally came with vista....over the years i had Xp then win7 on it. At some point i bought another laptop and forgot about the Vaio for atleast 8 yrs. Last month after watching a youtube video i decided to install tiny10 32bit, i was blown away that it works like a new laptop. I have use it everyday since. I suggest u give it ago.
If you want to push this palmtop to a new level, try Small Damn Linux 2024. It was redone from the ground up, and still maintains it's small footprint.
Had to scroll way too far down through the comments to see this. Damn Small Linux was my favorite Linux outside of SuSE before I switched my main OS to OS X.
Wow, I didn't know about a more modern version of DSL Linux! I used it, alongside Puuupy Linux 2.14 back in 2008 on my ThinkPad 560X laptop. Cool!
@@alexandrecouture2462 Yep. The info popped up in my news feed one day and I read the story on how it was redone with a modern kernel and had excess code stripped away. I have it installed on one of my Asus netbooks, and so far, it's worked great.
This would be super cool is the screen opened the way it does, but then folds flat onto the keyboard so you have a touchscreen and maybe joysticks, then build in cellular for on the go use. Would be an awesome pocket computer. I love the color too!
that's kind of a steam deck
Everything running as root 💀💀💀
i think they're doing that because any changes will be deleted anyway when you reboot, unless you explicitly save them. And having a default user to the RAM disk is exactly as safe as running everything as root from an infosec perspective.
With power comes responsibility! ;)
Most Puppy files and installed software are in a special folder, almost anything else in the root is read-only and the system runs in ram, so Puppy is one of the safest distros out there.
So basically it's an a jank immutable distro lol
He likes to live on the edge. Dangerously.
holy moly - I think it must be 15 years ago, that I used Puppy.
I think it was the time when I had a Intel Atom laying around.
Give Antix a try - It's also uses about +- 200Mb RAM on boot and most of the applications arevery lightweight. Alternatively, a new version of DSL (Dam small linux) was recently released, which might give it a bit more juice.
yeah other commentors said that too, would be pretty cool to see!
I once put Puppy Linux on a USB stick and, even for a Linux noob like me it was nice and easy. :) I'll need a temporary Linux for some tests and this might be just the thing.
And yes, it runs on potatos ;)
Action Retro is on pace to surpass LGR within two years.
I had fun fiddling around with Ubuntu based Puppy Linux back in like 2016. I wanted to see if I could run it from RAM, download and install VirtualBox and a virtual machine.
It was slightly trickier than i thought, mostly because of RAM constraints (I had 4GB RAM at the time), but i actually got a VM up and running! All in RAM 👍
Sure it kinda felt like a dead end experiment when i ultimately ended the day by turning the system off and losing the whole setup (I never had any good luck with that save data/session thing), but it was fun just to see Puppy hosting a VM in RAM.
It almost seems like the perfect thing to try to get a raspberry pi working in
hmmmmmm
funfact: older models don't have the trackpad thing, a smaller 2100mAh battery and well it came with vista. some stuff is diff too, like the memory slot placement + wireless switch placement.
okay but about those asian singles overseas
Came here for this comment!
Just a heads up, there seems to be your public IP address on the desktop on 8:20. That address points to Ardmore, New Jersey
Yup he accidentally did leak his public IP, hope it's not static. 8:26
Install android on it
Puppy Linux is a great little system and has grown so well. As for Haiku, that was one of the first things to come to mind.
Will run VLC though, and so long as you only play VGA quality it will work well enough. Firefox will work better, though you likely will be stuck with older versions, due to only having 32 bit support.
wow, I didn't know bookworm pup existed! this is a discovery for me!
Btw, watching TH-cam works perfectly in VLC even on a Atom N270 with half the power of the Z560. You have to install a TH-cam-Plugin in VLC and advice your browser to open videos in VLC. Using that even today to watch TH-cam on my N270, at least up to 720p. As the EEE901 only has a 600p screen I usually use 480p and safe some battery. With my HUGE replacement battery my old EEE901 is able to run videos for around eight hours.
There was at one point a version of puppy (possibly a puplet) that didn't have the user as root, but not sure if it's still around or maintained.
I got Puppy running on an ancient IBM Thinkpad T41, and everything functions except for not being able to figure out how to download video drivers onto the thing. The drivers for the old ATI Mobility Radeon chip do apparently exist, though!
I used puppy Linux so much during the day.
Used it on my family's old PC that came with Windows ME
Yay! Puppy Linux! I’ve still been thinking about trying to install it again, but portable on a jump drive like my old professor from back in college.
one reason why classicube probably ran slow: Intel GMA 500 seems to be PowerVR based which isn't supported by the intel GPU linux drivers at all. You were probably running standard VESA drivers.
What I wouldn’t give for a modern version of this. Such an amazing form factor.
i think with the technology of today, with all these portable windows gaming machines coming out every other month, some company can release one of these computers and being very functional for modern use
Old micro PCs are best used as thin clients, with a window manager such as fluxbox which will only use 6-9MB of RAM. Or use it as a ssh/vim remote development environment. Or both at the same time, lol. 3D performance would have been better if you stuck with Ubuntu Bionic based Puppy as the 3D drivers for those old Atoms was removed from MESA libGLX drivers a few years ago, and you were running in software-rendered mode.
im so glad so many tech channels are talking about how good old Vaio laptops and design was. Vaio needs to make a major comeback imo
Wow Action Retro this Puppy Linux video is Amazing It's really good to see you use such a masterpiece of Lightweight Distros hope you can Try Antic because its also Very lightweight And Its Supports installing form the Hard drive too
lol I used Puppy Linux on an old Pentium II system originally running Windows 98. It made it usable again
It's absolutely crazy that today you can stuff a 7840u into that form factor and have a system that can play most AAA games at at least 720p.
Still have mine. Best form factor (for a laptop) I've ever owned. If only the performance had been there. Would kill for a comeback with modern hardware (and an ultrawide “retina” display).
I'm using puppylinux on a quad-core phenom II, with 8gb of ram.
Intel Atom Z550 @ 2 GHz, 2 GB DDR2 I think Puppy Xenial would have worked on that, It's recommended requirements were 1GB of Ram and a 1700 Mhz CPU if I recall right. I had it running on this small Dell netbook that came with Windows XP and was also an Atom CPU, that thing sucked with Wndows but worked well with that version of Linux man! 😊
Nobody knows how many versions of Puppy there have ever been.
vaioPはホントおしゃれだったわ。間違いない
I've always liked the form factor of the Vaio. Something similar to that but not underpowered would be nice for a write/surf/media computer. I don't really need a full computer for that, but preferably something more than a mobile phone or a tablet. And I need a pretty good keyboard. Today I use a Gemini PDA but I'd like it to be a little bit bigger.
OMG that thing is gorgeous, and in my favorite color! (actually neon orange is but it is close enough).
On puppy linux you can actually change the desktop resolution so your intel GMA can run the game better (tho probably it would stretch the graphics unless configured on drivers to not do it), and i would suggest 800x600 for minecraft at this hardware, or if you can 640x480, and optfine on 1.2.5 minecraft or 1.5.2
Aww the Sony VAIO is so smol and cute. Would love to see that computer remade I know it be made even better since we have better stuff now.
A tiny machine like that with modern hardware like iPads and MS Touch laptops COULD be a very capable machine, and easily carryable for small common tasks. I like the idea.