el rinconcito

Livin' the high life:

• a 99 cent latte which was actually quite good.
  
• 
  
• the netbook.
  
• 
  
• a 24-hour wifi access card from this lovely hotel.
  

I'm way up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina for work. I checked into the hotel and found this delightful computer desk complete with choice of wired or wireless Internet and flat screen TV. Very comfy! I brought the tomatoes from home. I can't wait to see the cute mountain critters at work tomorrow.

As usual, Puppy Linux runs great on the Sylvania Meso netbook. I've posted about this slick portable Linux distro before, here, here, and here. The latest version, 4.20, is available for download here.

It installs easily on a CD or USB flash drive, and saves itself back every time, so even though it's not a permanent hard drive install (though it can be), you can keep all your changes.

I previously had Puppy 4.12 on my flash drive, so the upgrade was a snap. I downloaded the .iso file and extracted three files to the USB drive: initrd.gz, vmlinux, and pup_420.sfs. A quick reboot and I was up and running with 4.20. If it's your first install to a USB drive, the Puppy installer will take care of the flash drive for you. See the documentation.

The Puppy is a fast and portable way to have some Linux fun. It's especially nice if you are just wanting to try it out without making changes to your existing system. It handles the wireless just fine and knows what to do with about anything I jack into the USB ports. The default window manager, JVM, is prettier than ever, and the ICE window manager (icewm) is also ready to go if preferred.

One time I used the Puppy to rescue a torn up Windows XP system. Very handy!

Have fun! Oh, and like most Linux distros, it goes well with beer.