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Small is beautiful - Puppy Linux

Puppy Linux is the largest and most approachable of the tiny distros, and is much like taking a trip back in time to the earliest days of GNU/Linux. It is true that the early distros often needed bashing into shape and were often less friendly to the initiate than Puppy Linux tries to be, but Puppy has the same bare bones appeal and sense of intimacy with the hardware that made GNU/Linux so attractive to hackers and developers during its earliest days - the feeling that if you hack this a bit and that a little, you can make anything work just the way you want it to. At the same time, despite its minimalist feel, Puppy is visually appealing and carries a charm entirely of its own.

Puppy Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution for the tinkerers and fiddlers who want to pull things apart and put them together again just so they can know how things work. Where Debian Sid or Gentoo are the perfect playground for more sophisticated users, Puppy is the Lego Technic kit of Linux distributions, a perfect fit for the keen initiate; 100 megabytes of unreasonably easy scope for adventure on your computer. If you don't like it as it stands, you can pull in a few more parts from the Puppy ecosphere, a repository of Puppy friendly applications known as Puppy Unleashed, and create your own version of Puppy, called a puplet.

You can make Puppy, break it, and shape it into your very own vision, and build the Linux of your choice. In fact, Puppy encourages you to create your own personalised version. Puppy users have busy forums, and there are countless puplets (personalised versions of Puppy) created by adventurous users, which can be downloaded to illustrate what can be done.

Puppy supports a large range of wireless cards and is preposterously fast on anything greater than 64 MB of RAM. Just boot up from a rewritable CD or a USB stick and away you go. Puppy asks the user just three or four questions, language, mouse, keyboard and monitor resolution (although perhaps it could be more daring in accepting its own recommendations), and shoots up into an attractive default JWM desktop.

Puppy Linux JWM desktop

Puppy Linux 4.2, 'Deep Thought' runs a 2.6 Linux kernel and supports most modern hardware systems, as well as the older systems for which it is ideally suited. The default Puppy ISO comes with the SeaMonkey internet application suite (with Puppy extensions), AbiWord, Gnumeric, games, HomeBank finance management software, music and video software, and a broad range of network tools. Puppy is unbelievably fully featured for a distribution that weighs in at a mere 100 megabytes.

Puppy can be installed to disk in full or "frugal" mode. A frugal install is one where Puppy is installed to an existing file system in the shape of compressed, and optionally encrypted, files which are loaded into RAM each time Puppy is invoked, thus having a minimal effect on any other installed system. A full install, as the name would imply, is run from a dedicated partition, and requires less RAM. A full install of Puppy Linux will run amazingly quickly on 64 MB of RAM.

Next: Linux on a stick

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