Puppy Linux
Puppy Linux is a live CD Linux distribution started by Barry Kauler. It aims to be very small, reliable, easy to use and fully featured. Puppy boots up into Fvwm95 - a window manager that looks similar to the Windows 95 interface. The distribution is regularly updated and is well supported and documented. The entire operating system boots into a 64MB ramdisk and all the applications run from RAM. It is possible to remove the boot medium after the operating system starts. Included are applications such as Firefox, AbiWord, SodiPodi and Gaim. Puppy is considered useful for working on old computers, as an emergency rescue system, as a Linux demonstration system, or as a general purpose operating system. It can boot from: Screenshots of Puppy The options to create a Puppy version for hard disk, USB, Zip disk etc can be done from within live-Puppy (the CD version). When Puppy boots, everything uncompresses into a RAM area - the "ramdisk". The PC needs to have at least 128M RAM (with no more than 8M shared video) for all of Puppy to load into the ramdisk, however it is possible for it to run on a PC with only 48M RAM, because part of the system can be kept on the hard drive, or in the worst case, left on the CD. Puppy analyses your PC at bootup and this all happens automatically. Puppy is incredibly fully featured for a system that runs entirely in a ramdisk, but applications were chosen that met various constraints, size in particular. Puppy GUI apps are functional and fast. Puppy achieves serviceability, simplicity and efficiency. One of the aims of the distribution is to be extremely easy to set up, and so there are a number of wizardss that take the user through the establishment of a range of tasks. Version 1.0.1 is the latest version of the distribution which uses Mozilla 1.8. There are different editions of Puppy for each of three major web browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Mozilla. Older versions of Puppy will run comfortably on very dated hardware. For newer systems, you can run it from a USB keydrive (although if USB device booting is not directly supported in the BIOS you can use the Puppy floppy disk to kick-start it). It is also possible to run it from within Windows. Effectively you can have an operating system and a wealth of software up and running on a computer that needs no hard disk, and then remove the media from which you booted it so that there is no trace of it ever being there!
See alsoList of Linux distributionsComparison of Linux distributions
External linksPuppy Web SitePuppy wiki Puppy dedicated wiki
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