Teenage Clicks: TEENpup 2008, the kids’ Linux OS with adult undertones

COMPUTER hardware manufacturers obviously feel there’s a large untapped market among the world’s young: Witness, the Eee, the Cloudbook, the One.
These mini-laptops – and there’s a new one announced every week – have three major things in common: They’re cheap, they’re aimed at schoolkids and students, and they run Linux operating systems.
I suspect the inclusion of Linux OSes is more to do with keeping down production costs than a deliberate shift away from Microsoft and Apple.
No matter, it’s a welcome development for Open Source supporters.
And that brings us to TEENpup 2008.
As a branch of the popular Puppy Linux distribution, it’s targeted squarely at teenage users.
TEENpup 2008 contains the largest collection of multimedia and internet-related programs I’ve ever seen on one (half-full) CD (it’s a 499MB download from here).
But if you’re over 19, you shouldn’t dismiss TEENpup 2008 as being just for kids, because this small distribution packs some serious punches.
It comes as an installable live CD and uses the IceWM desktop environment as its default.
Pop in the CD and reboot your machine and, if you’ve got more than 512MB of RAM, TEENpup automatically loads into your system memory, meaning your CD drive remains free for you to use.
During the boot process you’re given the option to have Xorg or Xvesa handle your video setup – I tried both on three different machines, including a VirtualBox virtual machine, and both options worked beautifully.
The initial copying of files into RAM can be quite slow, but once you’re up and running TEENpup works very rapidly indeed – certainly on a par with Damn Small Linux.
It’s also an attractive working environment, though that cluttered default desktop you see reminded me of a teenager’s bedroom – there’s stuff all over the place!A Dillo browser launches at start-up containing a few useful tips, like how to configure networking by using the ‘Connect’ desktop icon.Puppy Linux is certainly a well-documented distribution: Under the desktop ‘Help’ icon is a folder containing the User Guide, which covers a broad range of subjects and configurations.Plus, there’s a useful guide for beginners here and video tutorials here, and a very well-populated and friendly user forum here.
If you’re new to IceWM (it’s not a desktop environment I’ve used much myself) it’s well worth taking a look at those video tutorials.
But what of the applications in TEENpup? Take a deep breath, because it includes:
Abiword (Write), Gnumeric (Spread), Scribus (Publish), XaraLX (graphics) Kpresenter (Present), mtPaint (Paint), GIMP, SeaMonkey (Internet and Mail), Kontact, Composer (HTML), Digikam (Camera), Kooka (Scanner), Showimg (Photos), Grip (create MP3s), and for those who like staying in touch there’s Skype, Kopete, Gaim, Gizmo and Jabbin.
As for multimedia applications – oh heck, just check out the screenshot, will you?TEENpup isn’t just a fancy-Dan show pony, though – there are some solid, highly useable utilities on board, too.
Take the ‘Drives’ icon – it’s a link to the MUT Media Utility Devices through which I was able to mount and access my various drives and copy files both to and from TEENpup.If you don’t like the Rox-filer file manager (I don’t – I’m sure there’s a way to stop it jumping in size depending on how many files a window contains, but I couldn’t find it), Konqueror is included and, in TEENpup’s default DarkT theme it looks lovely.
On the subject of themes, a right-click on the desktop allows you to access the menu structure, from where it’s an easy task to change the system theme to one of eight different ones – mostly, very nice indeed.
Returning to those utilities, there are desktop links for configuring your printer (via CUPS), zipping files (with Xarchive), installing Java support, configuring all kinds of hardware (Setup), and installing software (using the Puppy Package Manager).
PET packages are the main package system for Puppy, and they come in two forms, ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’. There are also unofficial DotPup packages availabe through this utility.So, certainly enough serious stuff there to keep grown-ups happy – but what about TEENpup’s much-vaunted multimedia capabilities?
Well, it’s here I ran into a problem.
Two different commercial DVDs (The Bourne Ultimatum and a disk about scientific discoveries) both failed to play in any video application.
TEENpup’s website claims commercial disks will play out-of-the-box, so this was a disappointment.
However, my collection of .avi movie files played fine in both Mplayer and VLC.
When it came to playing movie trailers on the Apple website, I expected the movies to play in the included Mplayer SeaMonkey plugin; instead, Mplayer itself loaded and the snippets played fine in that. Odd, I thought.MP3s played without any problems in Kaffeine, even when accessed on my external USB storage drive, and YouTube videos ran perfectly – plus, there’s a SeaMonkey plugin included in TEENpup which allows you to download YouTube videos – an excellent idea that’s certain to appeal to teenage users.
By now I was getting a very positive vibe from TEENpup 2008, so much so I thought I’d take the hard drive installer for a run... time for my second disappointment.
Repeated attempts to get TEENpup to install in a VirtualBox virtual machine failed, mostly, it seemed, at the GRUB install stage.
However, I’m sufficiently impressed with the rest of TEENpup to come back to this hard drive installation issue at a later date.
For the time being, I must say as a live CD TEENpup is extremely impressive.
You’ll be hard-pushed to find a more full-featured distribution, especially if you have multimedia leanings, and there’s enough good, solid general software here to keep even professional types highly productive.
I plan on using the system utilities provided to install TEENpup 2008 to a USB memory stick – the idea of having so many applications available to me in a pocket-sized OS is highly appealing.