I love Puppy

   I had some trouble with Puppy yesterday. Oh, no, my dog Zora is well and healthy. I am talking about Puppy Linux. It is one of very many Linux OS distributions. I have it on my old laptop (HP compaq nx9020, Celeron 1.4, 256+512 Mb RAM, 38 Gb HDD). Actually, there is at the moment three Puppies installed and all of them in the same partition. It was easy with Puppies - they are very friendly and can co-exist together. On the booting I choose which one I preffer to run - and here we are.
   So yesterday I started LightHouse (LH) Puppy and was going to watch video but found picture is somehow blurred, with abnormal colors and lost quality. May be there is problem with player? Ok, stop Gxine, start Mplayer - same thing. I rebooted comp to Boxpup - bingo!, it's simple player Xfmedia run smoothly and I enjoyed my movie.
   But what happend with LH? I did not installed recently any new software which could interfere. And after rebooting from Boxpup to LH trouble was still there. By the way, LH and Box Puppies are my old friends, but third position I keep for experiments. For frugal installation I just mount .iso file by clicking on it and copy 3 files to folder "Puppy-3". Next you have just reboot and choose "Puppy-3" from menu. That is all installation. And two days ago I got new last version of Puppy. So now I rebooted to it and opened video file there. Yes, there is same bad picture and it is common for all video files - .avi, .mpg, .mp4, .mov, .flv. (you get all codecs for them in Puppy on default). So I started videoplayer Gxine, opened Menu Preferences-Video-Drivers and there tried some options. Third of them was successful - I got ecxelent video. After that it was just matter of minutes to return to LH Puppy and set proper drivers for it's two videoplayers too.
   I am not so experienced Linuxoid and still do not understand how one OS settings can impact another. May be it was through video card itself?
But in any case computer is running, I got more experience. Happyend!
And there is some information from Puppy Linux official site:

How is Puppy Different?
* Small size, ~100MB! This lends itself to some very useful and unique features.
* 'Live' booting from CDs, DVDs, USB flash drives, and other portable media.
* Runs from RAM, making it unusually fast even in old PCs and in netbooks with solid state storage media.
* Very low minimum system requirements.
* Boot time is well under a minute, 30-40 seconds in most systems.
* Includes a wide range of applications: wordprocessors, spreadsheets, internet browsers, games, image editors and many utilities. Extra software in the form of dotpets. There is a GUI Puppy Software Installer included.
* Puppy is easy to use and little technical knowledge is assumed. Most hardware is automatically detected.

There is many different Puppy Linux "brothers" known as "Pupplets". You can find what is best for you.