Thread: Puppy Linux

Puppy Linux is a minimalist distro that demands very little resources from users in order to unleash its power. It supports installation on any media, like CD, DVD, USB Flash drive, internal and external hard drives¬you name it. And to run Puppy happily, the hardware requirements are: Pentium 166MHz MMX Processor, and a 20x CD-ROM drive or a bootable USB drive, else boot floppy to boot from other devices-no hard disk is necessary! Created by Barry Kauler, the Puppy was born on June 2003. Though it is small and thin, it stuns its users with its flexibility, usability and features. Puppy has its own personality, as it was made from scrap and has not been stripped down off any other OS.

Being small, it loads itself completely onto the RAM and runs from there. This makes for very fast program access times -almost nothing in my case. If Puppy cannot fit fully onto the RAM when booted off the CDIDVD, which might happen in computers with less than 128 ME of RAM, it loads in a swap partition (which you can create), or a swap file; else, it runs from media it was booted from (viz., a live CD). Puppy comes in different sizes depending on its versions and makes (official and unofficial). The official release stays below 100 ME. The latest version, Puppy 4.1 'Dingo', released on October 6,2008, is Puppy stands out from the pack of other distros with its unique multi-session live CD feature. You can save the sessions along with settings, documents and downloads in the very CD you booted from. Each new state is stored in separate sessions as directories. Sessions can also be saved in a USB drive or in a HDD with FAT or NTFS, where it gets stored as a single file with a Linux filesystem inside it. When booting, Puppy smartly searches all the accessible devices attached to the system, and automatically loads the latest session data and starts with the latest saved state

What's inside

You may not expect much from the 94.3 ME tiny Puppy, but it will astonish anyone with the variety of applications that cover all sections that fulfil most of our needs.
The desktop experience gets better with the simplicity and usability of the default, When booting from the Live CD, the boot screen displays some boot parameters that are handy under special cases. They are all self-descriptive. You can control the loading of Puppy onto the RAM, blacklist unwanted saved CD sessions, start the command line only, and more.

To get information on boot parameters, light and fast Joe's Wmdows Manager (JWM) and the fully¬functional ROX file manager. Other window managers like Fvwm95, IceWM, Xfce, Fluxbox, Enlightenment, and also KDE, can be installed. GNOME is still to be ported. If you want to give Puppy a personal touch, themes are available online, and can be selected from the Puppy menu. Formerly, Puppy was based on GTK + 1 and TclfTk. Things have changed now- it supports all GTK +2 applications.

Starting with the documents section, a reduced edition of AbiWord takes care of formatted word editing, with Leafy and Geany managing plain texts. A PDF viewer (ePDFview), PDF converter (puppyPDF), and a Wmdows .chm help file reader are at your service. The need of a spreadsheet application is satisfied by the fully Microsoft-Excel-compatible Gnumeric. You will even find a personal finance application (HomeBank), Osmo personal organiser, personal wild (DigiWiki), calculators, notes, address book, the Seymonkey Web page editor and more.



And with CUPS pre-installed, your printers just await your configuring them. As for graphics, Puppy gives you the fotox image viewer, as well as mtPaint and a light edition of the well-known Inkscape for necessary image editing needs. Apart from these, it has the digital camera manager GTKam and the Xsane scanner manager.

Now let us come to one of the most sensitive sections in Linux desktops-multimedia. Puppy has an in-built Pmusic audio player and Gxine multimedia player, which make it an excellent out-of-the-box multimedia player with lots of codecs support, including MP3, Flash and encrypted DVD playback. Ripping audiolvideo? It isn't a problem at all with Pbcdripper, Pupdvdtool and ripperX tools. Editing and burning ISO images are just a few clicks away with Burniso2cd and isomaster. Pburn lets you compile and burn files onto CD and DVD, and even onto BlueRay discs.

Coming to the Internet section, the SeaMonkey Web browser and Ayttm (which replaced Pidgin from 4.1) solves the browsing and chat application needs. The Axel download accelerator and the Pwget downloader are ready for the mass download addicts amongst us. Additionally, they also have the Pctorrent and Pcreatetorrent for torrent management. The gFTP ftp client, the Slypheed e-mail manager, and even an excellent VoIP application (Psip), along with Puppy's own PPLOG Perl blog with built-in Hiawatha Web server, completes the Internet set. One-click mounting and unmounting is driven by Pmount, and the excellent disk detection is thanks to the MDT utility.

supports TAR, ACE, RAR, ZIP, nIP, ARJ and many more popular formats. Among others, back- up utilities are batch file renamers (prename, gFnRename),
a disk cataloguer (Gwhere), partition managers (Gparted, Pdisk) , process managers (process), boot managers, terminal emulator (Rxvt, Xfproft virus checker), and a lot more to quench all your thirst. And don't forget to benchmark your system with the Hardinfo tool and test your RAM with Memtest.

Some of the assorted tools for your networking needs are PPPoE and dial-up connectors, Samba shares, Puppy Firewall. It also includes Rdesktop, which lets Puppy be used as a thin client with Wmdows XP, 2000 NT and 2003. And, of course, as in all distros, Puppy also has some games in-built. Currently, it has a number puzzle, jigsaw puzzle and a pubic's cube game, Obviously, more games are available on the Net. An<;l would you believe me if I say that there are some more applications that you can discover that I have not included in the article.