What are the latest "Top Dog" Puppy distros being used?

[spiritwild]

I'm curious, Whats the latest puppy distros that everyone has focus on lately. Fossapup or Bionic? I see a lot of posts about those two pups, are these the two main "big dogs"?

[fredx181]

I'm curious, Whats the latest puppy distros that everyone has focus on lately. Fossapup or Bionic? I see a lot of posts about those two pups, are these the two main "big dogs"?

IMO, BookwormPup64 and F96-CE too (edit: probably more suitable for modern computers).

[IdfbAn]

IMO, BookwormPup64 and F96-CE too (edit: probably more suitable for modern computers).

Maybe S15Pup64 too? I'm less sure of that, though.

[mikewalsh]

@spiritwild :-

I'd say Fred's closer to the mark, if I'm honest......plus, the Kennel Linux distros have a firm following. Despite Puppy & derivatives being primarily geared toward older hardware, I would say a major proportion of the membership still believe that newest is always best, safest & most secure.

Which makes me a terrible advert for the community, 'cos I don't use any of these; I live stubbornly in the past, and love my older Pups.....for as long as they remain usable as 'daily drivers'. I have Bionic, Fossa, and Bookworm installed, but don't use any of them very much.....my personal favourites are jrb's 'lite' spin on BK's old Quirky 'April', and PhilB's Tahrpup64 & Xenialpup64. Plus my much-loved Slacko 5.6.0....running 64-bit browsers from a 32-bit chroot with peebee's '64-bit_compat_libs' package installed....

I always was an awkward bugger....even as a nipper!!

(I love experimenting and playing around with older tech/software, and frequently surprise myself with what it's still capable of. I get endless satisfaction out of doing this!)

But I feel I'm quite atypical for a Puppy user. That's just me.

Mike.

[Wiz57]

I am still using (stuck with) S15Pup32, as well as older ScPup32 and ArchPup32. I modified my Pups via kernel and zdrv swaps for older kernels w/support for my ancient WiFi chip on this Acer Aspire netbook...also some of the later kernels utilize a different NTFS driver which on this netbook are extremely slow, it multiboots with WinXP, so NTFS access is needed.
Wiz

[Jasper]

@spiritwild

I use older hardware, so it makes sense to use an OS that provides long term support eg

So software packages can still be updated up until the standard 'End of Life' is reached.

[dimkr]

can still be updated

Puppy doesn't have an update mechanism that applies the stability and security updates Canonical releases during this long support period. Fossapup64 is stuck with a growing list of bugs and security issues that get discovered and addressed in Ubuntu 20.04 updates.

(And these updates don't cover all packages + some updates are only available to Ubuntu Pro subscribers)

[rockedge]

Puppy doesn't have an update mechanism that applies the stability and security updates Canonical releases during this long support period. Fossapup64 is stuck with a growing list of bugs and security issues that get discovered and addressed in Ubuntu 20.04 updates.

Did a cool thing that surprisingly worked. Using @wiak's APT SFS add-on which seems to work pretty good at doing a complete system update/upgrade for Focal Fossa. Seems to be updating many of the Ubuntu packages to the latest versions in that series. Then unloaded the SFS add-on and the accompanying adrv SFS.

Then doing a manual remaster and producing a puppy_fossa_rootfs. This step is tricky at times and no guarantees whatsoever that resulting version of Fossapup64 will actually work 100%. Unknown is how the PPM and pkg will function and if any of the tools dealing with built in packages will work either.

This is not quite as good as just building a new woof-CE version utilizing hopefully the latest versions of packages available for Fossa. Then modify and customize a remaster to add in the extra features. Fossa is right on the border of non-usermerge - usermerge system structure which must be accounted for when choosing a kernel.

[Jasper]

@dimkr

Could security updates be included to the OS if a new build was created by Woof=CE?

The new build would use the latest ISO release provided:

ubuntu-20.04.6-desktop-amd64

Is this incorrect?

[dimkr]

Could security updates be included to the OS if a new build was created by Woof=CE?

Yes, it will build with all updates applied. But it's a one time thing, you'll need to rebuild every time you want to apply updates.

[Jasper]

@dimkr

I was just looking to see the release cycle for update builds of Focal Fossa and they are approximately 6-12 months apart

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseSchedule

Regarding Woof-CE, would it then be possible to 'fork' @666philb repository and then run/build (sorry, don't know the correct term ) this?

My thinking was that it stays true to the original compilation but the only new introduction would be the security updates provided by ubuntu-20.04.6.

Also, I would have hoped that it would not need further input as to the selection/additional of packages.

Is this just wishful thinking of my part?

[dimkr]

I was just looking to see the release cycle for update builds of Focal Fossa and they are approximately 6-12 months apart

Canonical releases updates all the time (not every time there's a point release) and that's what you get if you apt upgrade. The periodic point releases are just a snapshot of Ubuntu 20.04 with all updates already applied, so you don't install buggy and insecure stock 20.04, then have to apply years of updates.

You can do a fresh woof-CE build every week and get more updates if that's what you want, or you can build once in 6 months (so if you build today but an update comes out tomorrow, you'll get it only in the next build - 6 months from now).

Regarding Woof-CE, would it then be possible to 'fork' @666philb repository and then run/build (sorry, don't know the correct term ) this?

The woof-CE tree with local modifications used to build Fossapup was never published

[Jasper]

@dimkr

Is it easier to compile directly using GitHub or on my own /device hardware?

As a beginner, that is.

My main bug bear is that Fossa uses the older build of OpenSSL and ideally, I would like to remove this and include the newer 3.x build.

[dimkr]

Is it easier to compile directly using GitHub or on my own /device hardware?

https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/w ... -on-GitHub is much easier than running woof-CE locally, and it will probably be faster (at the cost of bandwidth).

My main bug bear is that Fossa uses the older build of OpenSSL and ideally, I would like to remove this and include the newer 3.x build.

This is not how "longterm" distros work. Ubuntu 20.04 will never receive 3.x: it includes 1.1.1x but Canonical backports security or bug fix patches when needed. For example, 1.1.1f-1ubuntu2.22 is 1.1.1f-1ubuntu2.21 plus a security fix. This way, openssl in 20.04 gains only bug fixes and security fixes, but not new features (which inevitably add more bugs and potentially security issues) or breaking changes - this is what a "stable" distro means, as opposed to a "rolling" distro.

If you want a newer version of openssl with new features, you'll need a later Ubuntu version, because there are breaking changes in 3.x. In addition, applications that use 1.x need to be ported (changed) to support openssl 3.x so you can't just swap openssl and expect already built applications to work: you'll need to update everything to versions that build against 3.x, and build.