< Back to index
Puppy Linux is a LiveCD Linux distribution started by Barry Kauler. Puppy is very small, and is designed to be reliable, easy to use and fully featured. The entire operating system and all the applications run from RAM, allowing the boot medium to be removed after the operating system starts. Included are applications such as SeaMonkey/Mozilla Application Suite, AbiWord, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, and Gxine/xine. The distribution is independently developed from scratch. 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. It can boot from:
* A USB flash drive/keydrive or any other bootable USB storage device (flash-Puppy)
* A CD-ROM (live-Puppy), with six flavours to choose from.
* A Zip drive or LS-120/240 SuperDisk (zippy-Puppy)
* An internal hard drive (hard-Puppy)
* A computer network (thin-Puppy)
* An emulator (emulated-puppy)
* A floppy boot disk that loads the rest of the operating system from a USB drive, CD-ROM, or internal hard drive
Installing a version of Puppy on hard disk, USB disk, Zip disk, etc. can be done from live-Puppy or another existing installation.
GUI
Puppy has recently become window manager independent. Most of the Live-CDs include one of two X Window System managers: JWM (recent releases) and/or FVWM95 (older releases), which provides an interface akin to Windows 95 with a modern-looking appearance.
DotPup packages of the IceWM desktop, Fluxbox and Enlightenment are also available off a link on the [http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyLinuxMainPage Puppy Linux Wiki].
When the operating system boots, everything in the Puppy package uncompresses into a RAM area, the "ramdisk". The PC needs to have at least 128M RAM (with no more than 8 MB shared video) for all of Puppy to load 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 in the worst case, left on the CD.
Puppy is fairly full-featured for a system that runs entirely in a ramdisk; applications were chosen that met various constraints, size in particular. Puppy GUI applications are considered functional and fast. Because one of the aims of the distribution is to be extremely easy to set up, there are a number of wizards that take the user through the process of a range of common tasks.
Package management
Puppy Linux comes with two package managers, PupGet and DotPup, for use when running it; and Puppy Unleashed for creating a custom live CD.
Puppy Unleashed
These are the packages that are put together to create Puppy. Puppy Unleashed consists of over 300 packages, with an easy-to-use build script that enables the user to choose the packages you want and build the user's own custom Puppy LiveCD.
Since version 2.10 Puppy Linux does internally utilize the T2 SDE to build the binary packages.
Other versions
Puppy version 2.13 is the latest version of the distribution and uses the Mozilla-based SeaMonkey as its internet suite (primarily a web browser and e-mail client). There are different editions of Puppy Linux that differ in their size. The standard edition uses AbiWord as the word processor and is 68 MB; a live-CD ISO file with Mozilla Firefox is 52.4 MB; with the full Mozilla suite it is 55.3 MB; with Opera it is 49.6 MB. A 96.1 MB "Chubby Puppy" version includes the OpenOffice suite as well. A 39.9 MB "BareBones Puppy" version contains no GUI. And 83 MB "zdrv" standard edition, which contains massive collection of kernel drivers and firmware.
Along with Morphix, Puppy Linux is one of the few Linux LiveCD distributions able to save files to the LiveCD itself (multisession), allowing users to carry data, and more importantly, added programs and customized settings, along with them in the CD. Puppy-multisession is 55.7 MB.
Puppy Linux also has an interesting solution to the common problem of the existing hard disk being formatted NTFS (which Linux can read but not yet safely write): a compressed file that one can download and unpack under Windows which contains a 250 MB filesystem image. If, on booting from the CD, Puppy Linux finds this in the root directory of the hard drive, then it will use this as though it were a USB keydrive; since it never changes the file's size or any metadata, this is reasonably safe. However, to Windows, this is just an opaque binary file, whose contents are not accessible. One can use the Explore2fs tool under Windows to gain read-only access to the contents of this image file, while from the Puppy Linux side one can read the entire contents of the NTFS partition, so each operating system can read files created by the other. But probably the simplest way to make information accessible from both operating systems is by making a FAT filesystem available, either as a FAT partition on an internal hard drive or with an external storage medium such as a USB keydrive.
Older versions of the operating system will run comfortably on very dated hardware. For newer systems, the USB keydrive version might be better (although if USB device booting is not directly supported in the BIOS, the Puppy floppy boot disk can be used to kick-start it). It is possible to [http://www.freeveda.org/linux/puppy/index.html run Puppy Linux with] Windows 9x/Windows ME. It is also possible, if the BIOS does not support booting from USB drive, to boot from the CD and keep user state on a USB keydrive; this will be saved on shutdown and read from the USB device on bootup.
This entry uses material from from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Disclaimer.