Thursday, 12 January 2012, 22:26 CST
I just watched the excellent Twilight Zone episode "Judgement Night".[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_Night

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Friday, 20 January 2012, 13:11 CST

I've been using Puppy Linux[1] the past few days.  It had been a while
since I last used Linux, but being in a Linux class at school made me want
to try it at home again.

Puppy caught my eye because it's a live CD, but you can still save your
settings to a flash drive, or a hard drive or even onto the live CD.  I
decided to save to the hard drive (which also allowed me to create a swap
file, which I very much need on the machine I'm running Puppy on).

I haven't had many problems with it, and the ones I've had are probably
due to the old hardware I'm running it on (an old HP E-Machine with a
1.1GHz Celeron and 256MB of RAM).  I'm using Lucid Puppy 5.2.8.  I chose
that one because of the compatibility with Ubuntu and Debian packages (I'm
rather attached to Psi as an XMPP client and PuTTY as a
terminal/ssh/telnet program).

The biggest problem I'm having is with Firefox 3.6.  It often becomes
unresponsive (and renders the computer mostly unresponsive as well).  It's
especially bad on sites with heavy Javascript usage (e.g., Google Reader).
I know this is almost certainly due to the low amount of RAM.  In fact, I
have the same problem in Windows XP (which is installed to the hard drive
of this machine).  However, when it happens in XP, the computer is still
barely useable, but XP has a larger swap file.  I'll have to try
increasing the swap file size in Puppy, if I can figure out where the
option is in all the menus.

Other than the problem with Firefox, it runs quite well.  It found all of
my normal hardware, i.e., sound, video, it even discovered what modes my
ancient CRT monitor[2] could handle.  I haven't tried the HP PSC 750
printer yet, or the Veo webcam that I use as a microphone for Skype (in
WinXP), but one of these days I'll get around to it.

I don't have much else to say at the moment other than that I highly
recommend giving Puppy Linux a try if you're looking for an easy to use
OS.  I know I didn't give much information in this post, but more can be
found at the Puppy Linux site[1].

[1] http://www.puppylinux.com/
[2] It's an old Gateway2000 CrystalScan