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Old 05-31-2008, 05:12 PM   #13
synth
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Synthopia
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Default About security and more info on Puppy

Even if you run as an unprivileged user there are still many ways you can f*** up your system completely.Just a simple "sudo rm -rf *" line in the console will do it (kids,don't try this at home )

If you know what you're doing,running as root can be a good thing.You gain more speed,more time spent making music and you save yourself from frustration.
It's the same as running WinXP as an admin.

If you strip this OS so it won't be able to connect to any network/internet and leave just the firewire support,audio system,drivers,basic accelerated 2D and OpenGL,a few utilities,WINE and rpr,you can have a tiny 40MB OS optimized just for running your favorite Windows hosts/VSTi,such as rpr
Would you even need any security features in that case?

At the moment,the non-optimized kernel runs pretty fast. Just for fun,I did some tests on a very old PC with SoundMAX AC'97 integrated audio. Performance was stable without Xruns at 4ms latency (16/48,RT,SW buffers) on a POS single-core 2GHz Pentium 4 PC with 512MB of very slow RAM.Not bad for integrated audio.Brad Sucks plays fine,as do a number of my MIDI-only test projects.

Just imagine how good a really optimized kernel can perform with a SMP-capable CPU (< 1ms)

ALSA,JACK,OSS4 and WineASIO work.Haven't tested FFADO as I don't have any firewire devices at the moment.
Puppy can be made to work as any standard multi-user distro if you wish,but running as root still has its advantages IMO.


An "oddball" distro (that does things differently from the others) such as this one is just what we really need in this case

The amazing thing about this Puppy is not just how small,lightweight and feature-rich it is by default,but how it turns out to beat the **** out of every other lite distro when you remove the remaining 'fat' that's left on the CD.

Also,it's the only true LIVE CD out there.Many distros claim to be LIVE but they're not even remotely close.
You can run this one without any drive connected on your computer.Just connect an external USB CD or DVD drive,boot from it and then unmount and disconnect it.You're running totally in RAM

To stay lightweight,all files needed for compilation and development as well as the kernel sources aren't included in the main distro,but available as a separate module.
When you need to do conpiling,you just mount it,do your work and after you've finished,you can unmount it safely.
No need to install dev apps permanently and bloat your distro with junk.No apt-get and crap,no more searching for files and libs all over the net.Everything you need is included in just one module.

You can bloat Puppy with KDE,Compiz Fusion,Gnome,OpenOffice and many other modules and when you've had enough of them,simply unload the modules and reboot. You'll be back to the old lean-but-mean OS as before.This is one of the best features of this "oddball" distro.

[Updated Jun 1 2008]

Last edited by synth; 03-08-2009 at 06:40 AM.
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