Apples and other sorts of apples

I did a quick and dirty comparison of Breeezy and Xandros w/ tweaked Easy Mode, with XP tossed in for shits and giggles.

Boot times were measured by hitting Esc during boot, select the boot device containing the OS in question, and until a working desktop was avilable (ie: disk access stopped). Test was run with my Eee plugged in.
Running time was measured by plugging in a fully charged 5200mAh battery and running it down by continously playing a movie off my external hard drive (a Maxtor Basic 160Gb). Part of logic to run the test of an external hard drive (and use more power), rather than to copy a movie to a SD card or a USB stick was partly lazyness, partly to run the battery down faster (ie: worst case scenario). Volume, brightness etc set at the same levels, WiFi off.

Boot times:
- Breeezy: 45 seconds, booting from a Sandisk cruzer micro 4.0GB (includes connecting to the WiFi)
- Xandros: 32 seconds, booting from the internal SSD
- XP: 146 seconds, booting of a Kingston 2Gb SD-card, rated at 5MB/s read speed.

Running time:
- Breeezy: 2h20min
- Xandros: 2h25min
- XP: 2h5min

It's a Breeezy day

I'm backtracking on using BackTrack... it may be an excellent distro for those who either know how to use the agressive security features it provides, or has the time to learn them... But since I don't really need that feature, but rather see a need for a fast, lightweight live distro to either act as a backup for, or a repair tool for, Xandros, I decided to try a flavour of Puppy Linux: Breeezy.

More than simply try in fact; this post is posted from my Eee running Breeezy.

So far, colour me impressed! Not only was the installation simple enough for even me to follow (see here and here for the entire process), but the boot time from the USB stick rivals Xandros from the internal SSD. Setting up the networks was straight forward too, thanks to the thoughtfully provided wizards - just remember to activate WiFi before you boot into Breeezy, since the Fn+F2 combo don't seem to work.

The provided apps should do what i need from a backup system - web surfing and pulling things of the other drives. Add the fact that it comes with graphic tools and a movieplayer, and you go a OS that can keep anybody happy. In fact, I might put Breeezy on that SD card XP lives on now (and put XP on the stick I have Breeezy on) so I can run Breeezy with nothing sticking out of my Eee. I see the use for watching movies etc while traveling...

The provided setup has only gotten a singe tweak from me so far - I installed Ad Block Plus and Filterset G to Firefox. Not only does it saves me some real estate on my screen, but I don't have to watch ads unless I want to!

Off course, no blogpost is complete without a beutyshot of the OS in question, so here you go: