Adopt a Puppy

EE Times UK - Linux Fans Unleash New Distro Called ‘Puppy’

While not as new as the article suggests, Barry Kauler has indeed developed a unique distribution of Linux he calls Puppy. It’s not your ordinary operating system.

“‘I think one of the key advantages of Puppy is the simplicity,’ said Kauler, the developer of Puppy Linux, in an e-mail interview. ‘When other distributions start up, you see all these servers loading, but in Puppy it’s really basic and bootup is remarkably fast. However, I still managed to stick to the requirement of it all loading into RAM and freeing up the CD drive, on a reference 128MB PC.
That small-is-beautiful theme is Puppy’s raison d’etre, according to Kauler. ‘If I were pressed to list why I think people use Puppy, it would be [that it's] very simple under-the-hood, very easy to use, very fast, highly portable, and easy to install.’”

What sets Puppy apart from the usual crowd is that it’s a distribution assembled entirely file by file. It’s not Debian or Mandriva based like so many of the smaller Linux versions.

“‘Although I have used other distributions for compiling, mostly Slackware and Mandrake, Puppy is not based on them,’ Kauler said. ‘In so many cases, I reinvented the wheel to get tiny size. For example, my unique printing system uses PDQ and the Gimp-print IJS drivers, but is tied together with my own Printer Wizard, written in Ash (I don’t even have Bash).’

‘At one stage, Puppy only had GTK 1.2 and C apps only,’ Kauler continued. ‘Then I reluctantly added C++ apps, then extremely reluctantly adopted GTK2. I opted for Tcl/Tk rather than Perl, partly due to size, partly the great number of useful apps written in Tcl/Tk. More recently, there is also the Qt3 library, which allowed addition of some great apps like Scribus.’”

All this, and it can boot from a USB drive.