Underrated Distros - Puppy Linux Bionic Pup

hey everybody its Matt Hartley and today we're going to be looking at lesser-known distros or at least just roasts that maybe we've heard of it but we've never really given it the proper chance or maybe we haven't looked at it in recent light or maybe just possibly I feel like being arbitrary and saying hey I want to look at this distro today so today we're gonna be looking at Puppy Linux bionic pup running the 32-bit edition in a VirtualBox but I also run it on an old netbook because it's kind of great I really like it so Puppy Linux is a unique distribution in a number of factors first and foremost and let me pull this up here so I can talk authority on it and let's pull that up alright so one of the big things that strikes me about Puppy Linux in general is the way they handle user management so what do I mean by that Puppy Linux gets a lot of grief for running you as an administrator out of the box you're running is route that's generally pretty terrifying on any other distribution in the world but what makes that interesting for Puppy Linux is that that's not necessarily that big a deal Astor it why am i putting an asterisk next to that so when you're looking at a Linux distribution like this you have to understand a couple of things first and foremost Puppy Linux is a distribution that is lip and labeled a toy distribution this has been labeled a distribution that is best left if you kind of close your eyes and picture a fisher-price play set that's what Puppy Linux has been labeled by within most of the clinics community it's basically it's something to play with it's useful for installing on an old computer like my old Tripoli netbook for example and getting the most life out of it that you can but you've got to be careful though because after all you're running as an administrator and you're not getting certain updates and things the way you might nor not normally so before we even jump into that I'm actually going to pop into my settings here real quick and I'm gonna add something I think will add some light to it so without even getting into the pictorial end of it I want to talk about root spot and Fido basically and I'm going to provide a link to this for those of you that are either listening in the audio mp3 or perhaps you are just watching this on your television set on YouTube and you don't necessarily have your laptop out right now that's fine look for look for this in the show notes there is basically three types of users in Puppy Linux root spot and Fido and it's a little bit like kind of a root limit you know a regular user in a absolutely really limited user and for the most part you're gonna want to run as root because that's gonna allow you to do what you want to do as far as on the local end of things okay additionally it's worth pointing out that Puppy Linux actually comes with a firewall built into it that's 0.14 security so whatever you're doing on your local desktop for the most part you should be pretty good outside of the ports you allow in and out that's kind of up to you right now internet accessing applications however you do want to make sure that there are some limitations put into place that is important and that's where spot comes into it spot basically brings us kind of the you know it gives you the freedom to work with your local system but at the same time it restricts what you can do on the Internet I generally recommend taking this approach now for those of you listening to the audio version of this what I'm doing at this point is I'm switching gears to the Bionic pup desktop and I'm going to actually open up the control panel again you're not seeing this I'm just describing it as we go here and I'm going to look for the one of the first start settings we find when we first jump up here and let me see if I can find that quickly here we go let's try that here we go okay so for those of you viewing this or listening to it we are looking what's called quick setup and quick setup basically is one of the first things that pops up when you install or run off of a you've USB key for Puppy Linux and it has such things as setting your country your location your preferred language and a variety of other things but the stuff that we're going to be looking at specifically is under the network section so if you were later on if you're listening to this in an audio format later on look at this you're gonna be looking at the network section of the quick setup menu there are a number of options mentioned here firewall enabled time from the internet and my favorite run internet apps as spot when I roll my cursor over to run Internet apps as spot it's going to tell me tick this if I'm interested in running internet applications as a non route user for extra security now folks I gotta tell you that does help now I'm not I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that this is as secure as running an enterprise level distribution it's not I knowledge this but again you can in fact do that and by doing so clicking okay applying those changes now it brings up an additional option this is OK alright so clearly you're wanting to do some stuff here login and security manager comes up and again reiterates what I was talking about where you have an administrator you have that limited user and then of course you have that what's called fin which is basically you know it's I don't even really mention it because I don't think it really matters I you can research that on your own I don't care because I'm not here to do a how-to I'm basically giving you kind of a review but spots interesting because you can pick your applications you want to run as that limited user so that the permissions that it has on your desktop are in fact limited now before I go any farther this is important for everyone listening or watching this to understand this is not a multi-user environment alright so in addition to a firewall and in addition to having a distribution here that also allows you to purposefully select what level of user has access to the application on the Internet so if you're running a browser it you're not going out there's route because that's terrifying right we get that that's fine it's absolutely totally understandable and we can resolve that by using that spot user so I just want to get that out of the way and I know that it's kind of a weird way to jump into a district review but it's one of the most important things that I think has to be spelled out is that it's not that Puppy Linux doesn't have security it's just that it does it a little differently and maybe not as in-depth as you would find with a proper distribution that we would normally come to expect with you know arch or an arch based distro or a Debian based distro or Fedora based distro or whatever it may be you know it it definitely is it takes us it takes a different approach okay so there's no app arm or any of that it's the security is there but it is done differently so I think we've pretty well got a handle on that we understand that that does exist that is a thing a firewall is in fact an option that does exist you can actually set up the firewall or not which is nice this particular case I don't have it set up but you can see it does come with a firewall this is a really great understated distribution but again got all the security stuff out of the way that's cool so for those of you listening to this and not watching it I can open up a firewall application called firewall set up and actually choose quite thoroughly what I want to enable or disable and by default the setting is that all ports are blocked unless I uncheck them now that's you know for a software firewall yeah I want that because let me pick what I pinhole openings for in my distribution or my operating system I I think that's a really good way to do it so cool I like that if I uncheck that then these new options appear and I can select things like open a port for SSH or cups or samba or maybe I have a media server I can do that very very easily that's nice I like that and I think what's kind of great is it's basically it's it is to be truthful for those of you not viewing this yourselves this is the jank East looking firewall you'll ever see it's pretty bad but to be honest with you some of the other firewalls i've seen in linux that are basically its face it's all IP tables under them under the hood we're all pretty janky looking so we're not really missing much but it does its job and you know you can do custom ports you can do the predefined stuff it's all pretty standard so firewalls exist that's great the overall feel of Bionic pup is very reminiscent of anyone it's experienced puppy in the past you've got your network stuff you know you can actually get in there and figure all that out you can set up your wireless network so you can set up your you know your wired networks your file sharing all that stuff it's all very doable the one thing I would point out though is that there are some pretty significant differences on doing things one of the biggest of course is the users as I pointed out previously that is kind of weird it's definitely something that takes a little getting used to also even though this Bionic pup is actually based on a boon - it's done things are done a little differently so if I come in here and I want to install software for example I basically would then click the install option which is located on the top part of the desktop upper right it's labeled puppy manager or puppy package manager and Universal installer so this is not only how I would go and install puppy onto my hard drive or onto another USB Drive or however I choose to do it this is also where I can install my applications now applications and puppy are interesting in that most of them come down to a simple package manager that is fairly familiar for anyone that's used to using Linux in any capacity on any distro it's all pretty straightforward I click package manager which is located right here you those are you listening I'm basically pointing toward the center of the page and it's called the pit packages so I click this pet packages it opens up a new gun new box called package manager version two point one point two and from here I can either browse based on the repository for the software that I'm looking for the category or if I know the name of the application I want I can install it so let's give this thing a run for its money I wonder if it has OBS nope okay fair enough needs to under that repository now maybe it does other work elsewhere let's try this - OBS again does not look like it OBS studio is not found all right I wonder if it's searching all the different repositories so I'm gonna come off of a bun - bionic main and go-to or universe rather and go to one of the puppy options and it doesn't look like it does no it looks like it is in fact searching them all nice that's that's my understanding is that is in fact not available let's try kdenlive okay so kdenlive for those of you that are listening to this you actually can't install kdenlive 17 point 12 so that's not bad right I mean that's that's not like it's an amazing feature in something incredible but you know most packages do seem to exist so that's cool let's see about audacity audacity is also on there let's see what some other software that I use on a regular basis we run down the list here G UVC yeah let's try that one okay do you see the nope so my webcam software is not available let's try a few other ones that I use on a regular basis to do tilde tilda is available so I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that every package you possibly wants out there I think a lot of these are probably gonna have to be installed separately and that's fine that's what it is whatever it's unfortunate that we can't just say Oh every package that I use under a boon - is is available but for the most part it seems like that if it's not PPA based or it's not snap-snap based or what out it is available now I don't know actually if puppy support snaps or not I don't think it does but I do believe it supports 1/2 images and I do believe it probably does so reasonably well so that's kind of cool all right so at any rate we have a puppy we have a puppy package manager that's a lot of peas and thankfully I've got my pop filter in place and hopefully that's working well now when it comes to installing other stuff such as chromium Firefox things of that sort you would actually take a slightly different approach so you come up to install and then you go to install applications but then it's student if the package manager you would use what's called the s FS file from the official repo basically these are modular packages that you can install stuff like chromium Firefox pale moon and sea monkey very very useful if you have other SFF packages to install manually there's an option below that first one it basically says load and unload SFF packages using FSS load you click that it says hey be aware this is experimental you say that's fine you click OK there it is Bob's your uncle you're fine you browse to it you load it everything's screwy now I should point out that for myself personally I did make use of that ladder s FS option in that I had to get this working well for VirtualBox you wouldn't know it because I pillars on either side of the desktop here but and that's mostly because of my weird my weird orientation monitors a very unusual shape and so getting my video and my desktop emulation to Matt be matchy-matchy is a little hit and miss sometimes but in order to do this in any capacity I did need to have my guest additions installed now to do that in VirtualBox normally on something like Linux Mint or some of the more probably Manjaro as well and some of those other distributions it just kind of already there you don't really have to think much about it with Puppy Linux you actually have to jump through some hoops to do that and I'm gonna show you what those hoops are because it kind of it took a minute to figure that out because it's not the way you would do it with most distributions on a boon to base distribution you would install your make sure your Linux headers are in there of course you would also make sure that you have built essentials installed and then of course you got to make sure guest additions are also part of that equation but for MIT for mint rather have for puppy it's a little different I actually had to take a slightly different detour and to get these packages I had to install these f sm pack s FS packages boy that is gonna be the death of me trying to say that over and over and let me see if I still have the page open in the browser here see if I can load that up will restore it boom baby boom all right cool yeah here we go right on so on this page on SourceForge I basically downloaded the headers and the sources now by doing that the sources are what and then of course the headers but the sources are what allowed me to get my guest additions to work from there I was then able to say alright now I'm going to go ahead and do the whole usual download of my guest additions in VirtualBox itself and that was just like you would do it any other time where you actually do it from the VirtualBox menu and that's easy enough but after that this is where it gets kind of weird I'm gonna browse to this here so I'm basically browsing to wear it then down it you obviously have your eye so you mount the iso by double-clicking the guest additions iso but from there you actually have to browse to user share and then VirtualBox okay that's where you mount it I'm going to mount that ISO from there it's opening up a brand new window for me that's under it's basically under mount essentially at this point and in that I basically running a run file called the Box Linux additions if I've done everything correctly oops let me jump out of this here if I've done everything correctly when I run that by making sure my headers are installed in making sure that other stuffs good to go everything's good I don't get any weird errors it says everything's fine it goes through an installation process I asked me to hit enter i reboot the virtual machine I usually reborn' reboot my actual host machine as well just for good measure it's overkill but do it anyway and everything's good and I'm getting the the all the goodies that you would get with guest additions in a Linux distribution so that's what of the thing one of the things that I thought was weird with puppy is that it's a little different to get things working alright enough of the boring you know eating your vegetables stuff let's actually look at what this actually looks like right alright so here on the very bottom we have our usual our usual stuff we have a clock we have our little system monitor we have a fire our firewall icon for those of you listening that a lot of this is going to be very visual stuff but you'll get the general idea of how try be as descriptive as I can it's pretty standard of volume control a clipboard manager you know your network settings and all that stuff but it's it's really nothing to be too too concerned with you have an application launcher at the bottom you have your places launcher it's very known to driven it feels like basically but in a very open box like wait you can actually come out to the center of your desktop and just right click with your mouse and get that same launch that you would get from your applications menu and from there you can actually then browse through and see what types of applications you have it's got a lot of cool stuff I mean some of this stuff is really really surprising and some of the stuff we need to talk about a little deeper it is fascinating you I mean you got a lot of I mean you can run Compton on this I mean for now this is kind of cool I'm gonna actually show the videos of you watching the video I'm gonna actually show you this I'm gonna run Compton and basically what that's gonna do that's a compositing manager right now when I minimize a window it basically is it's like off on light switch off and on you don't really see anything visually compelling but if I start Compton now when I minimize something there's a there's a gradual fade to it it's kind of cool actually it's very modern feeling uh it's a visual thing I mean who who really cares but it's definitely definitely interesting so every window now that I minimize or maximize or making any changes to it has a very visual feel to it it's you know it's it really that big a deal not really but it's fun so we have Compton enabled now that's nice we've got screensaver controls a theme manager which you know is quite literally just a very vanilla you know xfce to known to feeling mattei feeling like being manager it's very very straightforward very simple not a lot to to worry yourself with so that's nice it's got a lot of good stuff but it also has some things that really surprised me and I want to actually talk a little bit about that it's got stuff installed by default that really shocked me a lot actually we got graphic equalizers we have a radio mic for internet radio we have a podcast manager we've got you know a sound mixer which that's pretty guess that's pretty standard but we've got a optical disc tools with in addition to having the ability to shrink or burn DVDs as well as CDs two separate applications an ISO an ISO file editor a video or audio recorder doesn't do that you know all that good stuff that's just under multimedia you get into the internet all the stuff you would expect your puppy phone which is basically voice over IP it's kind of like a you know no meeting or something along lines are the skype like application of sorts an IRC chat which is pretty standard for most just URLs but it's nice to see it included we have transmission 4-bit BitTorrent and an SSH GUI which but really I you know distro like this I was really shocked to see and it's not half bad actually it's very reminiscent of X to go if those of you listening to this you have a box to basically enter your username host import you've boxes to check off for X 1114 or if you have a if you're using RSA authentication you're good to go you have verbose and quiet options port forwarding escape characters the whole package it they did a nice job really really pleased with that so that is really pleasant to see that stuff you've got the option to get a different web browsers we talked about and basically that's opening up what we talked about previously with s FS in that you basically can install chromium or Firefox and that's that's all fine and good so yeah it's not bad that's just under internet you know I says as we continue to go upward like under Network for example we have our we have a port scanner we've got you know or Samba simple management which I'm not going to lie it some of this stuff's pretty great we have an FTP client so Samba simple managers actually pretty neat because it really makes this stupid easy to share things some of this is very simply Memphis and feel to it it has that there's a wizard for everything kind of mentality to it but it's nice you have a big button that says hey Sambas off and you can click it you on/off you can set up your your NetBIOS name if you're working with Windows machines if you want you can actually choose something different and then you've got share names and share locations your work group name all that good stuff it's it's pretty great and that of course is under network yeah it's they did a nice job I'm very very pleased with that oh and they've even got a little rinky dinky password manager under the personal section of Puppy Linux and I thought that was pretty neat I don't think I necessarily would put any critical passwords in it because honestly I don't I don't know enough about us to it's how up-to-date it is how secure it is I don't know enough about that sort of thing but it's nice it's definitely a nice nice little bit you should also note that Puppy Linux in Bionic does of course come with your typical office suite you do have a spreadsheet you do you know you have a PowerPoint style presenter word processor all that good stuff made available so that's always nice to see of course and that's under the business section the basically if you're wondering what type of word processor you end up with it is not Libre Office because you have to remember that this is an operating system that's designed for older computers so you're looking at a B word and that's great because I don't think a B word gets enough love now here's where it's weird so I hope for those of you that are not watching the video right now I opened up a B word and it's got a weird transparency going on and apparently that's a Compton thing I'm not gonna lie I kind of like it it's weird so the text area is completely translucent and you can see the wallpaper behind it and it's kind of great I like that that's pretty weird so yeah it's not bad by default graphics installed you got Inkscape you got a some sort of a paint painting tool oh you do have a camera manager that wasn't the one I use in a boon to matei which is I'm not going to try and pronounce it but basically it's the one everyone uses for setting up their logitech webcam but you have a gtk cam camera manager which that's kind of cool wonder how basic it is I'm going to open this up and I'm going to see well I can't select a camera because I'm gonna actually have one but that's fine whenever what kind of options it gives you does it look like it gives you a ton but that may be just because it's not yeah I don't know does it look like it gives me a ton of options but I suspect it probably allows me to change change framerate and other things that I care about so that's kind of cool not bad you've got xane as far as your scanner management because it again you're trying to use applications that are as low low usage as possible so that's cool easy peasy print apparently that is a graphic photo editing thing let me see if I can grab that and pull it open and I can select an image then can select my imaging tools from different options photo a photo program paint program camera program and my printer that's kind of neat there's a lot of stuff on here I've never really even conceived of as far as I would have ever heard of otherwise it's it's not bad now that is quite the rundown and quite a list of stuff I'm sure I've just bored you to tears but I want to just kind of give you an idea of how puppies different a few things to be aware of when you're dealing with puppy you got to choose to what you're gonna do with your boot manager so for example if you are running puppy on a machine that is exclusively puppy you have to remember when it prompts you to install a boot manager or you're gonna have a bad time and it's not gonna work I think there's a some sort of a Microsoft centric boot manager that they use it works fine however if you have grub already installed I think there is also an option for that but again I'm not gonna get that far deep into it because that's not what this is about this is not a how-to but that is something to consider so there are some things that are not as easy as I would like them there's some things that are not terrible let me pop back over here for a minute and I want to look at one other thing get back into setup and internet connection wizard alright no I gotta kill that Compton that's killing me I'm sorry you're not the pair with me init that's just bugging me to death that's not gonna work you need to stop thank you okay so Compton skill all right so one of the things I wanted to talk about it's the way that it handles internet connections this is very old-school and by today's standards is probably a little outdated but it works well and it honestly provides a little more continuity and more options for people that are experiencing issues with say Network manager in your traditional distribution of Linux with Puppy Linux you basically have your connection type and your desktop tray options so if you open up what's called the internet connection wizard from believe it's actually under utility no it's under setup in your menu ok you open that up you are presented with a number of options and the options that we generally are looking for are wired and wireless LAN or dial-up if you are in fact using something that requires such a thing and of course we have the wireless GPRS modem roaming penguin pppoe options as well it's pretty great I said I like it of course all your proxy server stuff is in here as well it's not bad so let's say I was setting up something that was for wired or Wireless I clicked that option which I talked about earlier wired or Wireless that brings up a new set of options and this is where I think newbies are gonna kind of fall over you end up with it's a little bit like running Katy in some respects you end up looking at three completely separate tools to handle your networking needs so in most distributions you simply say oh I have network manager I'm going to connect to a wireless access point or I'm gonna be connected to a wired access point and I it's just happened and I'm done and that's kind of the end of it we're and of course with wireless you would then choose what you're looking to do but with puppy it's a little different you actually have three completely separate options some of them are newer than others frisbee is one I remember that it was really awesome for roaming but not so useful for you know local Wi-Fi it's kind of overkill there's another one called network wizard and it's basically very sophisticated and it's really two best to be ignored unless you really have the need to dig into some of the heavier deeper stuff and I'll open it up and kind of show what I'm talking about basically it allows you to load modules and do stuff that can be done normally so let's come back to that so I you know it's whatever network wizards whatever I like what's called the simple network tool and they even mentioned that this is recommended for most people I bring it up and it basically brings up a very straightforward menu that has profiles and interfaces and in this particular case because I'm running this in a VirtualBox it simply shows my interface name the type which it's showing up is wired which is correct the driver being used the bus and of course a description of the driver in place as well and that's great you also have the option to install a Windows NDIS wrapper driver if you want to go that route and that's all fine and dandy you click over to the another tab you a profile option this is really useful for wireless users but probably not really that important for anyone else unless you're connecting to a wired connection you need special profiles for going to different locations but whatever so networking setup is pretty it's pretty straightforward but it's a little weird with puppey it definitely is a little different grub for das that's this is yeah so when you are installing Puppy Linux this is what I was talking about earlier you actually will face a situation to where you have to decide all right do I have grub installed okay you need to need to be aware of that where to install boot up loader grub for us you need to know whether or not you want to not rewrite the existing Boot Record leave it legacy blood bubble above this is something you're gonna have to kind of fool with on your own you can roll your cursor over each of the options that are labeled for you and it will give you a general description as to what it does for example there's one option called search within this we're search within only this device you roll your cursor over it it says limit the scope the search scope so that the installations on other drives are not listed up recommended only for removable devices so that's probably something you would use in that particular case there's another one it says do not rewrite menu dot LST and that makes sense if you are in fact needed to do this sort of thing so it's really so here's the thing it's highly unlikely any of you guys dual booting with puppies so what I would do is come back over to pup come up back up to grub for das as everything stands here leave everything alone just let it be and you would hit okay during the installation and move on with your day it's fine so I that's one of the weird little things to point out definitely worth mentioning you can also remaster puppy which is kind of cool in this particular case I've clicked the option for it it says hey I don't have anything ready to go obviously I don't have the live CD so it doesn't really matter and of course you can remaster it from there that's neat it's pretty cool and you know I'm definitely not gonna lie it's not it's not terrible you even this okay so I'm kind of excited about this for years puppy was not really known to be really that great for anyone it has more than one screen attached to their computer well that's not the case anymore they now have czar fee sounds like a really atrocious breakfast cereal but apparently you can actually run multiple monitors with a nice GUI tool called czar fee and it will actually show in my case I only have one monitor hooked up and you can see that weird resolution I have to use here just to make it work with what I need but because of the fact that I have different situations going on with my webcam and transferring back and forth but in any rate just all this usual stuff you would find under display settings for any other distribution it's kind of great the cloning options right left up down snapped edges what your resolution all that stuff you know and then of course selecting them for the individual monitors that's just cool I really appreciate and like that very very pleased of that yeah I mean that's really all there is to that it's it's pretty straightforward if you ever need to come back in and run your initial setup wizard again you can do that that's pretty great all the stuff you would really expect in a distro is in fact here excuse me and that's cool and I'm very appreciative of that I think that's super neat they've even got synchronization tools under the utility section of your menu gr sink if you want to synchronize things you can mirror backups you can copy drives and partitions folks there's really nothing that puppy can't do but it's a distribution we don't really think about anymore do we at least I don't but I do now use it on my old netbook and it's fun it's a fun distro it's different and I think you guys should check it out Puppy Linux bionic pup comes in 32-bit 64-bit really I can't think of a reason why you would run 64-bit puppy but hey whatever you can if you want to if you know maybe someone out there wants to take the plunge and run this as their full-time desktop hey that's cool go for it I think you're nuts but hey that's fine you know I think it's completely overkill but it would be entertaining do you think and I want you guys to really look at this try puppy out and let me know do you feel like that it has all the tools you would need do you still have secure security concerns because remember any updates you get are in fact going to be coming from let me pop back over to it here so I can show you alright are going to be coming from SourceForge so you're going to actually have to go and get any updates you have you have to have the make shirts you have everything matchy matchy as far as your ISO and your checksum and all that so pair that in mind is this a distro that you would run full-time hit the comments I'd be interested in hearing about it I don't know it might be interesting if it had all the software I needed it doesn't but it's perfectly capable of running it it has literally a variation of just about everything what do you think hit the comments let me know and I will see you again next time and next video we are gonna be looking at well that's a surprise but I think I think it's a worthwhile surprise and I think it's one you're all going to enjoy additionally I've got some great stuff coming out too new t-shirts are coming and they are awesome also if you enjoyed this video and you didn't run away screaming by now thinking oh my gosh he wouldn't be quiet he just keeps talking about puppy utilities that just won't die if you're still stuck around for all that support my patreon if you feel wild crazy go for it the descriptions on the link you the link is in the description router and of course you can see the banner here and you can make a clicky clicky linkie linkie from that and make that work for you so that's at patreon slash freedom penguin if you want to be a patreon and you will get this video early and those of you that are watching this on patreon already know that and those of you that are watching this a week later well you get it faster and you can get tips and tricks that aren't really that well-known to everybody including Jack Audio and how I use kdenlive to do wild crazy things and all sorts of cool stuff become a patreon Sport videos like this and support independent crazy creators such as myself until next time

Channel: Linux Videos with Matt Hartley

Views: 20,977

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Id: N7mDvKaxRUA

Length: 38min 12sec (2292 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019