puppy installed a home dir on my sda1, called pup001 or something and now I want to view it on another distro.
"mount" tells me it's not a block device and "file" tells me its ext2.
how do other usually view it from another linux distro?

There's a package called Explore2fs that will open and view the file through Windows

if, for example, pup001 is on hda1
if hda1 is mounted on /mnt/hda1
if you have mount point /mnt/tmp
you can type:

mount -t ext2 -o loop /mnt/hda1/pup001 /mnt/tmp

you should see your pup001 files should be in /mnt/tmp

You can also see the contents of your pupxxx file using Explore2fs. Just follow these steps:

1. Download Explore2fs∞
2. Unzip the file
3. Execute explore2fs.exe
4. From the main menu select 'File | Open Image File ...'
5. In the file type drop down box select 'All Files (*.*)
6. Browse for your Pupxxx file, Select it and click Open