Pussy Linux Full Install


I was looking at the Puppy Linux forums and came across Pussy Linux. Puppy Linux was named after it's author's dog; Puppy. I don't know if the author of Pussy Linux owns a cat named Pussy, or not, but he's obviously into cats. The trash bin is call "Kitty Litter", the start button is labeled "Meow", etc. ...and, the desktop has a great cat picture on it:

pussy linux logo

 

Puppy Linux used to be what I ran on my laptop; last time I did that was with Puppy 4.3.1  I had Puppy installed to my laptop's hard drive, which isn't the preferred method of using Puppy. Puppy is designed to be used with a flash drive, Live CD or as a frugal install. Puppy does supply a hard drive installer, so I installed it to my laptop's hard drive. This is supposed to cause some problems with Puppy, but I didn't have any.

 

One of the "problems" caused by a full install with Puppy is that you can no longer install sfs files by just placing them in the /mnt/home directory and listing them in the boot configuration. What's an sfs file? I think sfs stands for "squashed file system"; files that end with ".sfs". SFS files are software packages; e.g., devx_nnn.sfs  is the software package that includes the compilers for Puppy. So if you want to compile C++ programs on a full install Puppy you have to download the sfs file and 

(1) Bring up a Rox filer  (kinda like Windows Explorer) and click on   the sfs icon; this mounts it.
(2) Open up a terminal, cd to the directory with the sfs file, and enter:

# cp -a --remove-destination ./* /
# sync

(3) close the terminal and click on the sfs icon to dismount it; reboot. Then you could compile programs to your heart's content.

I wrote a blog a little while back about putting a flash drive on Caprica (my Pentium 4 system) with Legacy OS2 on it; a spin off of Puppy 2.1.4 I also wrote that I had put the gcc compiler on it (devx_214.sfs). I recently installed Legacy OS4 on my hard drive (a spinoff of Puppy 4.2.1) but when I followed the algorithm to install devx_421.sfs on it, the gcc compiler didn't run. Like I said, I had no problem with devx_431.sfs when I had it on my laptop (a Dell Inspiron; Caprica is a Dell Dimension). 

I thought I'd look at the Puppy Linux forums for advice, but I came across Pussy Linux. Pussy Linux had a long list of software that was already installed on it, like gcc; just what I was looking for. Pussy Linux is based on Debian, so you can easily install any of the 29,000 programs written for Debian. This sounded too good to be true. An OS small enough to run comfortably on older hardware, yet easily upgradable at any time. ...and I didn't have to worry anymore about trying to install gcc.

I went to http://www.thepussycatforest.info and downloaded Pussy Linux with the intention of installing it on Caprica. After creating a live cd, I looked for the installer on it, but it didn't have one. I went back to the Pussy home page and looked for info about installing Pussy. Sickgut, the author of Pussy, had advice on his web page for installing Pussy, but hadn't gotten far enough in it's development to add an installer. I checked the Puppy Linux forums again and found that there were several posts about installing Pussy, but they all looked like posts about failed attempts. Maybe I was out of luck.

I went back to the Pussy home page and followed Sickgut's advice on installing Pussy. I also took a look at a tutorial on GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader - the program that loads an OS on a computer) and lifted a few lines of code from it. That was all it took, and I now have Pussy Linux installed on the hard drive of Caprica (and everything works, too). Here's a post I put on the Puppy Linux forums, in case some of the posters were still having problems performing an install:

 Pussy Install

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