Submitted by “PuppyLinux is one of the most popular ‘flavors’ of Linux, I have used it on several old P-II and P-III machines that I donated and it got them to work when the original OS (95 and 98) would not even so much as boot up. It was just after PuppyLinux’s offer to be the OS for the One Laptop Per Child and the new ‘Unofficial PuppyLinux Guide‘ came out that I first contacted Kenneth of PuppyLinux. I wanted to know more about Puppy, the OLPC and what goes into making a guide for a Linux distro, Kenneth was kind enough to share his experinces with me.”
Puppy and DSL are the best for breathing life into old hardware. Plus the entire community around this flavor of Linux is kind and helpful.
I highly recommend it!
Fluxbuntu is also very nice. The advantage of Fluxbuntu is that it is much more expandable. DSL isn’t really Debian, and trying to use apt-get to install the less usual Debian packages often doesn’t work. So you get restricted to DSL ports. Puppy is a one-off and again restricted in packages.
Not knocking either one, they are great examples of Open Source initiative at its best – DSL is amazingly fast, and Puppy manages to look great, be user friendly, and run on low end hardware as well.
One should note that since Puppy Linux 2.10 it is based on the T2 System Development Environment (SDE),
http://www.t2-project.org
, to create the actual binary package that are then further post-processed. Although that alone is pretty cool it also offers the opportunity to rebuild Puppy Linux for other architectures and custom needs.