“Guest columnist Howard Fosdick has previously used Puppy Linux to successfully revive ‘mature’ PCs. Now, he takes a broader, deeper look at the parsimonious distribution and its potential value on normal desktop PCs, covering its features, flexibility, capability to peacefully coexist with Windows, ease of use, and limitations.”
Just wanted to add that since v2.10 Puppy Linux utilizes the T2 SDE http://www.t2-project.org/ to build the custom, size optimized binaries: http://www.puppyos.net/pfs/
From the article:
“Unlike most Linux distributions, Puppy is not based on some other distro. It was created from scratch to meet these goals.”
I was under the impression that the latest version is based on Slackware 12.
I may be over my head here, but I think what they have done is make Puppy “compatible” with Slackware 12 packages. They made sure that certain versions of important libraries were compatible. The actual OS is not based on Slack, just many Slak 12 packages can be installed (I wouldn’t think all could).
I remember when this distro was rather new. While it was functional and great, it was hideous and unusable in part due to the desktop environment that it used. It’s kind of nice to see that free software has come so far in such a short time where even specialty distros look respectable.
(Disclaimer: I do use and love free software, and I don’t mean to sound like a jerk.)
… this is basically advertising for ‘puppy linux’
Everything in that article could apply to any popular linux distribution.
All that the article does, is describe what’s possible with any Linux distribution, except it does it by peppering the article with it’s name.
Puppy makes mess.
the article says that puppy-linux kicks ass on old computers, and rightly so. my old pentium 2 laptop crumbles under the weight of xubuntu, but flies with puppy linux. it is as fast as damned small linux and much more comfortable.
Everything in that article could apply to any popular linux distribution.
Not really. Not only is Puppy much lighter by default than most modern distros (and speaking as a PPro user in 2007, I have a lot of firsthand experience with this … distros like PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu are resource HOGS when installed on a 128MB PPro, assuming you can even get them to detect classic video cards and PS/2 mice correctly in the first place), but it also allows one to use it as a CD-R LiveCD that can update itself as needed, and it supports a wide variety of boot mechanisms out of the box that most distros can’t handle without a LOT of tweaking.
Puppy is one of only two distros I’ve seen that come close to that type of thing (the other being DSL). Most of the others are heavy and inflexible in comparison, or (like Austrami) not functional enough to be of much use. SLAX also comes close, I guess.
Edited 2007-10-10 15:06
Puppy is very cool and is a great project. Some really neat stuff. I think the puppy project is more than just a lite install. Puppy has lots of fun tweaky stuff to play with. If I truly just want a lite install then I preferto install debian and you still have all the debian goodness at your fingertips.
Edited 2007-10-10 19:46
I absolutely love this distro! While I don’t use it for my every day desktop, I enjoy using it as a demo to show Linux to friends and acquaintances.
Two things that make Puppy Linux stand out for me are it’s small size (around 90 MB), and the fact that if you have 128 MB of RAM or more, it will run completely out of RAM, making it extremely fast!
I found an old 128 MB USB Flash drive, and for kicks, followed the easy instructions on the Puppy Linux website and installed Puppy to the Flash drive. It totally fit, with a bit over 20 MB remaining, and on computers that boot from USB, it will boot fairly quickly and run like a charm!
Kudos to Barry Kauler and crew for creating and maintaining this excellent Linux distro!