Walter Kruse offers up his experiences with Peanut Linux over at DesktopLinux.com. Not talked about as often as more high profile commercial distros, this flavor of Linux is fast, lightweight, and suited to both new and advanced users. Kruse steps us through his reasons for making a move to Peanut as his distribution of choice and offers us some tips and links for customizing the environment.
Moving to Peanut Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
http://www.peanutlinux.org/
website down or is it me?
Try here: http://www.ibiblio.org/peanut/
Doesn’t sound worth the effort to me.
Can anyone sum up why peanut is different? Why do people like peanut? I didn’t find this review answered those questions.
Been using it for a couple of years (1-2 or so). Since about 8.something I believe or was it 7? Not sure anymore. Its always been small and really customizable. Had all the basics for a running system. Lots of the latest features before the major distros. Recently since the bloat of kde he went for a smaller desktop environment, somthing that started with an “enlightenment” anyways it was nice and fast but I still thought it blew. Way to different than I expected. But packages available for kde or gnome and the forum is great. Fits in a laptop really nice. DO have to fiddle to get pcmcia running though so not all that easy. Still when I feel the urge to find out whats going on with linux and don’t want to download a 500 plus mb iso. A 100mb, then 112, then 150 or so. NOw 250 or is it 340mb? Ah kde, your bloat. /dial up account here. Took me 3 days to get peanut 9.3. Only 9 hours for 8.3 back in the day.
The horrible spelling was because I’ve been awake for a over 24hours /redbull /feel free to delete previous post and this one. Or to edit… ie, write: Peanut good at 9.5 current version I believe.
>>Been using it for a couple of years (1-2 or so). Since about 8.something I believe or was it 7?<<
It wasn’t till your second post did I no longer thing you were 8-10 years old. I was very impressed for a minute or so.
Funny, I just downloaded Peanut Linux and tried it myself for the first time last night. Its installation is reminiscent of Vector’s (mostly the same text-based screens), plus Red Hat’s Kudzu. It correctly picked up my optical mouse, my Conexant winmodem (haven’t tested it yet to see if it actually works), my ATI 7500 video card, my ethernet connection, and my i810 audio (which RH did only with this latest beta). Typefaces (my biggest gripe with RH) are excellent – crisp, sharp, very clear. Peanut must be doing something with the font rendering (TT hinting?) that RH isn’t. It doesn’t have all the desktop apps (e.g., no OpenOffice), but it has the latest Mozilla, KDE 3.1, Midnight Commander and a bunch of other useful stuff easily accessed.
Not sure at this point about ongoing support (bug fixes, security updates) and the availabilty of key apps, but as a simple, lightweight distro for someone who can navigate the text-based installation, this one seems really nicely done.
I had an ancient Toshiba laptop with a 1GB Hard Drive, 32 ram, etc. You get the picture. I installed Peanut on it because it was “peanut”-sized…….. Works fine. But for a modern laptop with adequate memory, I can’t see the advantage, except for their mailing lists and archives. Users are quite helpful and the community likes to help.
From the article:
It took me approximately two weeks to get the RPM dependencies right and run KDE for the first time. I don’t know if this is documented somewhere, or if I am supposed to just know this.
I can’t believe a distro would suggest straight RPM as their default way of installing packages. At least they could set up an apt-rpm repository. I also can’t see why any user would be willing to put up with this, when there are so many dependency-resolving alternatives: apt, apt-rpm, urpmi (from Mandrake), portage (from Gentoo), ports (a la CRUX), pacman (from Arch), and others.
Enlightenment really sucks, the desktop looks horrible, it has a weird mix of packages on the small iso, there aren’t many how-to’s or Peanut specific packages… I could go on and on.
But it is up to date, almost any package (rpm, tgz, deb) seems to install and work, it has most of the newest features working early. It was the first distro I tried that hot-plugging actually worked right.
I can’t explain it, but I keep going back to Peanut when I need a quick install that just works. After changing the desktop I can be quite happy with Peanut.
If I didn’t enjoy trying out new distros so much I might stick with Peanut.
Mutiny
my peeve is the installer is not very customizable, you can not select or UN-select individual packages…
another peeve is MYSql’s dameon was running right out of the box, on first bootup, KDE’s package manager seemed broken and would not let me uninstall MySql, something fishy about this distro i don’t like, same with Vector, they both seem stable and run smoothly, just the way they are built and not very customizable under the hood, i dont trust either one and wiped em both off my harddrive after a week of fiddling with them…
No Thanks, i will stick with Slackware, if i can not control the install & select or UN-select the packages and what daemons that run then i don’t want it…
I can’t believe a distro would suggest straight RPM as their default way of installing packages.
You mean like… RedHat ?
I Used peanut back on ver 7, it’s a great minimalist Linux Distro, Easy to install, its fast on older computers, It’s only downfall is that it’s RPM based, and you end up going through RPM Hell, like with any other RPM based System (i.e Red hat, Mandrake) I liked it much better than Mandrake, no clutter. but when they took out Gnome, I stoped using it.
I now use GENTOO!! It rocks, you build it all from source, and YOU choose the exact programs you want to use.Manualy (All through if your an linux Newbie Gentoo would be very challenging. It’s a great Distro if you want to have full controll of your OS, or just want to learn how Linux Works
I’m getting sick of this. Gentoo doesn’t teach you anything, and building from source doesn’t have *that* much of an advantage in the speed department. Peanut Linux has it’s own advantages.
What’s the point about being fast if I have to use rpm packages to do simple tasks? I’ve been a Red Hat user for a long time, and I’ve wasted entire days trying to resolve dependencies to get something working. If the distro doesn’t have a package manager like Debian’s Apt or Arch’s Pacman I just don’t want to know anything about it.
I’m using Archlinux and I don’t think I’m going to change it for anything in this life. I always get the latest packages the day after they are released (not like Debian which I was getting packages released one year ago). I’m always using the bleeding edge of Linux software. Why can’t they see that computers are made to do productive things and not to spend your days trying make them work?