Puppy Linux
is a lean, fast and
versatile Linux distribution developed from scratch. It
provides
a complete desktop suite in under 100MB. The entire operating
system and all its applications run from RAM, enabling the boot medium
to be removed. It can boot from:
A USB flash drive
A CD-ROM (Live-CD)
A Zip drive or LS-120/240 SuperDisk
Hard disk
Network
Floppy boot disk that loads the operating system from one
of the
devices listed above
It has a GUI SFS Boot Manager which enables the user to load "SFS"
modules (combinations of packages that are loaded at bootup without
actually installing them).
Included in this distro are applications such as SeaMonkey, Abiword,
Bluefish,
Xfinans, Gaim, Gnumeric,
Gxine, JWM, games, and an assortment
of utilities and tools. Although the standard applications
included with the distro do not include many of the linux heavyweights
(Firefox,
KDE,
OpenOffice,
Gimp,
Audacity etc) all of these can be
easily installed using the package management facilities (DotPup).
Puppy can be
useful for working on old computers, as an emergency rescue system, as
a Linux demonstration system, or as a complete general purpose
operating system. There is even now support for
reading/writing
to NTFS partitions.
The PC should have at least 128M RAM so that Puppy can be loaded in its
entirety into the ramdisk. However, it is
possible for it to run on a PC with only about 48 MB of RAM because
part of the system can be kept on the hard drive or even on the CD
itself.
The latest release aims for close binary compatibility with Slackware
12.
