NOP 4 aka the leaner Puppy

Puppy at 80 MB is lean enough. But the flab in the form of Abiword and Seamonkey can be a deal breaker especially since the usual repository route to adding apps is not an attractive option.
NOP is a puppy derivative, called Puplet, that does away with these two apps, brings in Opera and also changes the default file manager. With the original file manager I had a tough time figuring out a way to save files on the Desktop since there was no folder with that name. A visit to the puppy forum revealed that the file manager stored the Desktop contents a bit differently and the entries in some XML file needed to be modified. Thunar which is the file manager in NOP, since it uses a different Windows Manager as well, was already familiar since Belenix sported it.
Overall NOP is more appealing than Puppy. It retains all the good points of Puppy - the hardware configuration and extremely helpful tips are still there - and add a few thoughful touches of its own.

I think I'll have NOP for a long time to come. Especially since it can be run off the thumb drive, making it more convenient and faster than the live CD route. I still have to figure out how to load Openoffice onto it, and that would probably be the last touch needed to finish this excellent distro. The ability to "remaster" the installation is also a god send, since a backup on the CD can be retained.
There is a lot that Puppy can teach the other distros.

Bootable USB, finally

With the thumb drive rendered undetected after the last attempt using Kubuntu, I had to perform a low level format using the tool from hddguru.com. Since the tool is only for Windows, and I could not run it successfully in Wine, I had to go back to a system running XP to do the honours. Post low level format, as promised by HDDguru, the drive was back in action.

Since DSL was out of the race, I focussed on pendrivelinux itself, next. This was a 450 MB download, and no torrents were active at the time. I tried downloading it from the site, but got less than satisfactory download speeds. So rather than wait for the file to download I looked around for other options.

Puppylinux was the other distro that was hailed for its size - 90 MB and it also seemed to have a dedicated tool for installing to the USB drive. Downloaded and wrote a Live CD and booted into it.

Puppy inspite its size is a giant killer. A trendsetter of sorts, Puppy actually has meaningful user menu options that guide even the novice user through many esoteric steps through the booting process. It allows the user to select the graphics options, even offering a backup plan in case X failed. I was quite impressed with the userfriendliness of the distro. Unlike many other more popular distros I tested, Puppy was successful in loading the GUI in the native resolution.
It is more visually appealing than DSL, and has the SeaMonkey application suite compared to DSL's konqueror.
As promised ther was a tool to install to the Flash drive. Here too there are descriptive messages that hand hold the user through the entire process making it difficult to get something wrong. The first attempt failed, and on the second attempt I chose a different option suggested by Puppy. This time I was able to get a working bootable flash drive. The difference in the approaches was that in the first method the entire flash drive was formatted in ext2 and used, whereas in the second option the drive is divided into two partitions with one of them being a FAT16 file type for increased compatibility with Motherboard bioses.

Puppy was quite capable and I was taken aback by the extreme ease with which it installed my printer - while with opensuse I had to download the drivers. The wizard was HTML driven and hence devoid of the usual gloss, but it gets the job done quite well.

The drawbacks of Puppy which franky are heartbreaking were the absence of any really extensive repository. Or it could also be that I was unable to use it properly. The list of applications available are quite limited, and I could not find Openoffice in it. While there are links to the larger repositories, for some reason I am unable to search for an application name, and only those apps that are already available in the distro are displayed. Further fiddling is required.

Side Effects of Linux tools

This behaviour of Linux tools reminds me of Allopathic drugs (in contrast to other medical systems - Ayurvedic, Homeo etc). Allopathic drugs are all about balancing the benefits with the deleterious side effects that invariably occur due to the use.
The Linux tool in question is NTFS-3G. I had to use it to be able to access some NTFS drives. NTFS-3G makes entries in the Fstab, so any drive that is plugged in is recognised as NTFS drives and the OS tries to load it according to those parameters set by the tool.
In my case since the external drive was sda1 and sda2, while plugging in any other flash drive causes sda1 to be mounted as an NTFS drive causing errors. The solution was to delete the NTFS-3G created entries in the fstab and replugging the thumb drive.
I wonder if NTFS-3G can be set not to modify the fstab.

Bootable USB distro disastro

The quest for a distro that could be booted off the USB flash drive took a turn for the worse.
While the first attempt failed, trying to get Knoppix to boot off the drive, the second attempt with DSL was successful. Partly because there was a specific tool to accomplish this task, and all I had to do was watch the process after launching it.
After booting with the flash drive I concluded that the GUI was too basic for my taste, and revisited pendrivelinux.com for more options.
Kubuntu was the next item on the list. This too I did as told, and here is where things went awry. After configuring the drive, on reboot, the system would not proceed beyond the POST beep. I would get the beep, then the system would crash. The only way to get the system to proceed after the post beep was to remove the thumb drive.
I tried checking whether the contents of the drive were lost, but no the partitions were there as was the data. I tried deleting the partition, but that too did not improve the situation.
I am guessing that the Flash drive's boot sector has been damaged, but even in that case how could it crash the system - even without being able to access the BIOS to check if altering any settings would help.
Fiddling some more with hope.

Opensuse Automount Option

The inability to unmount a partition in Opensuse was begining to nag. On the search for a way to create a bootable Flash drive installation, I came across the procedure to do so.
The drives can be unmounted through a circuitous way which requires launching the file manager, and accessing the System tab in the left most column. There all the partitions that have been mounted are displayed. Access the Properties of the relevant partition and the option to unmount is displayed there. Here one can also manage the auto mounting behaviour of Opensuse.

By the way, the initial attempt at creating a bootable flash drive failed with Knoppix 5, and instructions from pendrivelinux.com. I recall Damn Small Linux had an explicit option to install to USB, and I am hopeful that will do the trick.

NTFS-3G

This is the module/app that is needed to enable accessing NTFS partitions.
In Opensuse while I could read these partitions, even the root account was not permitted to write into the partition. That was when I went hunting for ntfs related apps in the app manager.
To my surprise I found that ntfs-3g was already installed, though I have no recollection of installing it. So, probably, it is preinstalled in Opensuse. The other crucial piece of the ntfs family was the ntfs-config package which was the gui to control ntfs-3g's behaviour. Without it, I am sure ntfs-3g could be manipulated from the command line.
With ntfs-config installed, it is much easier to set options about the ntfs partitions in the system, and control which of them have R/W access to it.
In the first instance, ntfs-config would present an error that the ntfs partition was busy and so the modifications could not be made. Since mine was an external drive, plugging the drive into the USB slot would invariably mount the partitions. This was an issue that I found irritating, since there was no way to unmount the partition.
In my case, the partition was loaded under /media/New Volume which could be accessed from the file manager. With the partition editor, I could not unmount the parition, something that I frequently did in PCLinux. So under the command prompt, I tried running the umount /media/New Volume command, and got an error that "media/New"was not found. Apparently the space in the loaded name was the issue, which is quite strange. Looking at the partition tool found that "New Volume" was shown as "New\40%Volume", but replacing this in the umount command also did not work.

With ntfs-config (run this command) I could set the mount location manually quite easily. The mount option had to be "forced" since otherwise it would give an error.

The nag that remains is that I need to do this everytime the system is booted and also everytime the drive is plugged it. For some reason, Opensuse reverts to the older "New Volume" nomenclature eventhough the fstab entries are modified, and this time I get a permission denied message which prevented even viewing the contents.

Open Sesame Opensuse 11

One important point that lead me to abandon PC Linux was the fact that eventhough it was based on Mandriva, it did not use the same repositories. This is a major peeve for me since having different repositories and package nomenclature causes fragmentation of the linux family. Since Mandriva is more entrenched than PCLinux, and the latter owes its genesis to the former, the least that PCLinux could have done was to retain package compatibility. An analogy that springs to mind is Mint Linux and Ubuntu. While Mint is based on Ubuntu, it also retains package compatibility so any app downloaded for Ubuntu can also be used for Mint. By sharing the repositories and package standard, Mint is freed from the need to convert packages and also maintain repositories. These are major resource hoggers, especially if you are a small team (as is in the case with most distros). By splitting the Mandriva family, PCLinux has created another area that would consume resources which could have been used to better the core product.

Got the OPensuse 11 live CD with KDE4. And it works as the previous edition (10.3), which was quite good itself. The KDE4 does add a lot of additional GUI features, most of which I do not like, but one significant area of improvement is the ability to use the Realtek gigabit LAN chip onboard the motherboard. This, I assume, is because the Linux Kernel is newer and has the drivers bundled. The lan chip proved to be too slippery for all the older distros - except Belenix based on Opensolaris.

There are no conspicuous changes that immediately catch the eye. Most menu options remain the same. The Widget placeholder (on the top right corner of the screen) is new, but I do not find any need for it. The Dolphin File manager is new. As is the plugged media indicator in the system tray.

Best of PCLinux

After spending considerable time with PCLinux, I have decided to replace it. Two biggest drawbacks of PCLinuxOS : ever crashing synaptic (the application manager), and inability to detect external USB drive.
Both were becoming issues that I could not ignore anymore. The external USB drive had no problems with Opensuse or Windows.

PCLinux still rates as the most user friendly distro. Some features that are worth mentioning :
1. The Partition tool : unlike the one seen in Opensuse, this tool offers greater control over the mounting and unmounting process; is much more informative with regard to the relative location of each partition. This is a tool that deserves to be standardised across as distros.

2. The Application Manager : unlike Opensuse, where the repositories need to be configured discretely, Synaptic offers a single interface where one can configure repositories as well as install/uninstall apps. It is also much easier to modify the behaviour of the manager to retain downloaded rpms for later use. This is another tool that deserves to be standardised across all distros.

3. The hardware GUI features are also quite good, but here Opensuse is an equal. Hardware GUI refers to the presence of GUI tools to manipulate hardware aspects like Graphics card monitor, network card etc.

PCLinux 2008 is already available, though I have not tested it yet. So far in the latest crop of distros I have sampled Kubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 and both fall significantly short in user friendliness, when compared to Opensuse 11, which is what I intend to use as the default. Opensuse 10.3 which I have begun using increasingly is more stable in the app. management field, and for the time being that is more important that the other advantages that PC Linux offers.

The SMART way to manage apps

The default Opensuse 10.3 app manager, not sure what it is named - YAST2?, is great at installing and uninstalling apps. But, recyclability is completely ignored. Downloaded rpms are deleted once the installation is complete. And as I found at linuxquestions.org, thanks to google01103, there seems to be no way to modify this behaviour. What this incident also showed me was that basic tools of Linux also are modified across distros, since the help entries quoted by google01103 did not exist on my PC, and neither did the command switches for the rpm command. Very strange.

Google01103 also mentioned an alternative app manager (I was ignorant about the ability to use different app managers in one distro), SMART. SMART is a package that can be installed from YAST2. Since I was not keen on using SMART from the command line, I also selected SMART-GUI package for installation. About 10 MB was downloaded and installed, including dependencies, and after that I could use SMART. To launch it, the command "SMART --GUI" , or the SMART entry under the Configuration menu can be used (though for some reason this stops with a "-gui command not found" error).

As the SMART manual at labix.org mentioned, the default rpm deleting behaviour can be modified with a "smart config --set remove-packages=false" command. To test this I installed a media player PIA. And as promised, the downloaded rpms were located at /var/lib/smart/packages (unfortunately, PIA itself did not make an appearance in any menu, but running the pam command gave the usage options). Interface wise SMART is leaner than YAST2, there seems to be no way to control repositories, so I assume the YAST interface is to be used to modify sources. The first step would be to refresh the cache since otherwise the app list in the repositories are not reflected, and searches end without result.

One lesson which I learnt, was the relevance of the point I made some posts back, that one of the first steps that an user to do after installing a distro is wade through the app list in the distro and try to install all relevant packages before starting out. This saves a lot of time and effort (and bandwidth) later.

Package recyclability is important to avoid redundant downloading of packages to install the same app in different PCs with the same distro. It would seem quite a significant oversight on Opensuse's part. I think, PClinux has such a facility (or was it Mandriva?).

Foxit

An excellent PDF viewer, albeit only for Windows. One reason to have Foxit is because the internal PDF viewer in KDE cannot handle multiple page printouts - printing more than one page of the document on a single A4 sheet.
Foxit on Wine is the solution.
The hiccup is when trying to use Foxit as the default PDF viewer. It gives an error stating the command line usage options.

Update : 27.6.08
For some reason some documents are not printed correctly in Foxit - the text appears either inverted or as bars. Serendipitous discovery : KPDF the inbuilt PDF viewer DOES handle multipage printouts. Requires eagle eye to get to the option.

Reading RARs

By default RAR format archives cannot be handled by any distro. In Opnesuse, when trying to open with Ark, the message received was that "rar was not found in the path". The solution was to install the unrar package with the application manager. With this installed, I could open RAR archives.

Trusty Testdisk

I have had the honour of using testdisk many times in Windows. An excellent tool to restore partition tables and deal with other issues that can occur in the critical sections of a partition, Testdisk is god-incarnate.

I found out that it can also play saviour in Linux, thanks to its multiplatform nature.

The XP installation, previously mentioned, being on the C: drive could be easily included in the grub menu by adding "chainloader +1" and "makeactive" terms, to the grub menu. but since C: drive being the only primary partition on the drive, I wanted to shift XP to another partition. Post installation, I was confronted with a "disk error" message.

Reverting back to the grub menu (since the reinstallation again wiped grub) I loaded PCLinux, and did an fsck on the drive. fsck indicated that the partition table differed from its backup and offered to restore the backup. After permitting this, I reran fsck, and was dismayed to find that the restoring had not succeeded. This is when I remembered test disk.

Since PCLinux had consistently failed to install any new program through the application manager (always ending with an "cannot access rpm database" error), I loaded OPensuse to try to install Testdisk. First I downloaded the RPM (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download) and double clicked on it. The application manager flashed briefly and then nothing. Then I tried using the application manager to include testdisk from the repositories. On doing a search I discovered that testdisk was already installed.

How can one be sure that an application is installed, if it does not make an appearance in any menu? Run the command from the console. I did this and was presented with the familiar testdisk textbased interface. A little browsing was needed to get to the required menu, on running the tool to check the parition, it reported that the original and backup differed. Then I restored the backup, and reran the tool to confirm. This time the backup was successfully restore.

On a reboot and reentering the grub menu, I was able to boot into the fresh XP installation.