Linux 2739 Published by

Puppy Linux version 1.0.6 has been released



The live-CD iso file is 55.7M. The two big items in this release are Abiword 2.4.1 and the multisession DVD.

Release notes:

With the 2.4 series, Abiword has come of age. This is now professional wordprocessing, and Puppy enhances the pleasant experience with a large number of plugins included in the live-CD, including grammar checker and equation editor. There is an American-English dictionary, others can easily be installed.
The "multisession Puppy" has been greatly enhanced, especially for DVD. If you have a DVD burner, this is the way to go (if not, consider buying one!). The Puppy multisession DVD-R is a very smooth experience. For the uninitiated, this boots up from DVD and saves everything back to DVD, no hard drive required at all -- see introduction to the concept here.
Alienx (Forum name) has done a superb job with his simple remaster-CD scripts. I have placed his scripts into the menu "Setup -> Alienx simple remaster-CD". These are an alternative to the "official" remaster-CD/DVD script.
Thanks to Klhrevolutionist and MU (Forum names), for dict and GUI frontend PBdict, for accessing an online dictionary. This can be found in the "Word processing" menu.
The multisession DVD has a desktop icon for saving changed files to DVD without actually shutting down. This is great if you have a unreliable power supply and don't want to risk losing some critical work.
Burniso2cd script is upgraded to handle DVDs as well as CDs.
TightVnc replaces TkVNC VNC client. See information about Rarsa's (Forum name) TightVnc server in notes of 31-Oct-05 below.
Puppy now has Partview, a tiny Tcl/Tk script that was originally called disk.tcl. I hacked it to work on Puppy. Partview gives a graphical display of the free space on mounted partitions. It is launched from the "Control Panel" menu.
Pmount, the Puppy drive mount/unmount script (a more basic alternative to MUT), has been rewritten. You will find it in the "File managers" menu.
An alternative to the Gaby addressbook, named Dlume, has been added as a PupGet package.
Puppian's Ticker is upgraded to version 006, TkDVD to 3.8.3, keenerd's WAG to 0.3.2, Jesses' MUT to 0.0.7b, Graveman to 0.3.8, Fig2dev to version 3.2.5 alpha 7.
I have upgraded the dd utility program from Busybox to the full version.
growisofs has been updated from version 5.11 to 5.21 (taken from Vector). Have also got dvd+rw-format, dvd+rw-mediainfo, dvd+rw-booktype and dvd-ram-control. All of these are from the dvd+rw-tools package.
The metamail program is now in Puppy. It is needed by Sylpheed. See notes for 4-Oct-05.
The Links Grammar and gtkmathview packages are included in the live-CD, to support the Abiword grammar and equation editor plugins. This was done to get the complete experience of Abiword "out of the box", though future versions of Puppy, and custom versions, may relegate these to PupGet packages.
The controversial "peach" theme of 1.0.5 is now taking back-stage. The default will now be the original JWM colour scheme, arctic-seagull desktop image, and the original GTK theme. The live-CD inbuilt JWM/GTK coordinated themes will be original, peach, XP and blueX.
As usual, heaps of "under the hood" bugfixes and infrastructure improvements.

Most important: there are two separate iso files, puppy-1.0.6-mozilla.iso and puppy-multisession-1.0.6-mozilla.iso. Both of these can be burnt as multisession, however the latter offers an enhanced experience as there is no boot menu (whereas the former requires boot-option-5 to be chosen on first boot).
Puppy Linux version 1.0.6