Minipup to Transform a MiniPC into a True PC

Puppies, puppies, puppies...aren't they cute? Cuter would be a "puppy" that were able to run on a less than $100 ultra-low-cost computers. The MiniPup Philippines-based organization, run by Raffy Mananghaya computer science professor, aims at maintaining an extremely light Linux distribution, called Minipup, that should be able to run on low-powered computers, for example computers with Pentium II or III class processors.

The Starbox PC, equipped with AMD GX466 400Mhz processor and 128MB-RAM has been booted by Minipup in 58 seconds. Built from the famous Puppy Linux, Minipup benefits of extra or modified boot-up scripts that should help conserving the RAM usage and to enable booting from USB-connected CD-ROM drive. The applications that are included in this version can run in 640x480 resolution, except a few, such as Mozilla Seamonkey which has two big dialog windows. Mozilla Seamonkey is also said to take a longer period of time to load. Therefore, to a first start-up it needs almost 12 seconds to be loaded, due to the numerous large library files. Except a few other programs, such as Abiword, which needs from 2 up to 8 seconds to be loaded, all others start in just 1 second, or less.

The tests were made on a eWay Co TK mini-PC, based on an 800MHz Via processor. The mini-PC loaded Puppy Linux 2.16's kernel via PXE, then used tftp to fetch a compressed filesystem. The complete boot was accomplished in 53 seconds, with local user configuration optionally stored to a USB key between boots. Raffy Mananghaya said that the PXE booting for Minipup was made from the upstream release of Puppy 2.16, to which also added support for the PXE-friendly SFS bootloader, and some other new features. According to him, one of the Minipup project's future plans is to offer a distribution specifically for diskless mini-PCs that boot via PXE.