Nate Drake decides to look in on Fatdog, a Puppy-based OS that’s grown into a very credible canine in its own right.
Every dog has its day and for the team at Fatdog, there have been many. The project started out in 2008 as a simple extension of Puppy Linux. Any experienced Linux user will tell you that Puppy’s designed to be lightweight and easy to use, but the number of customisation options and requirement to install extra software to have a workable OS make it unsuitable for beginners.
Fatdog (as the name suggests) is the pup grown up. Its developers have placed emphasis on a fatter – that means more bundled apps – version of Puppy, while remaining very fast and efficient.
We couldn’t see any better proof of this than when downloading one of the latest versions (814) of Fatdog, as the ISO weighed in at just over 500MB. The OS is also compatible with pretty much any computer using an Intel/AMD CPU released since 2008. On first boot, we chose to load the OS in Throwaway mode, which means into RAM but, like Puppy, you can install to a drive if you prefer. If you do this, Fatdog can store its settings in your existing FAT, Ext2/3/4, NTFS partition using two simple files – no partitioning required.
Monkey business
On first boot, it’s clear the team has lived up to its claim of having a desktop ready to use. Incidentally, the desktop environment uses the extremely versatile and lightweight Openbox. The official web browser is SeaMonkey (v2.2.2), though we noted the Internet menu also lists Firefox and Chrome, which can be installed via a mouse click.
There’s a host of video and sound editing tools, and we were particularly impressed to see the latest version of VLC. Productivity apps include LibreOffice Writer, Calc and Impress, as well as the Evince PDF viewer. Fatdog also includes a range of image-editing tools, including the lightweight mtPaint and GIMP.
If you want to install extra software, Fatdog packages come in two flavours. The first is TXZ and operates along the same lines as Slackware, in that it contains a single compressed file with all the application data
