Tom Radcliff recently put me on to Puppy Linux, a live CD Linux distro that he is using where he teaches high school. I got a chance to test it out, and I am really impressed. Check out the mission statement:
* Puppy will easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media.
* Booting from CD, Puppy will load totally into RAM so that the CD drive is then free for other purposes.
* Booting from CD, Puppy can save everything back to the CD, no need for a hard drive.
* Booting from USB, Puppy will greatly minimise writes, to extend the life of Flash devices indefinitely.
* Puppy will be extremely friendly for Linux newbies.
* Puppy will boot up and run extraordinarily fast.
* Puppy will have all the applications needed for daily use.
* Puppy will just work, no hassles.
* Puppy will breathe new life into old PCs
Beyond the speed (it puts both my OS X and XP machines to shame in this department), I really like the idea that this Linux distro is as small as it is … only 60(ish) MBs. As stated above, users can actually use the other 590-640 MBs to store files as the OS setup allows you to use the existing CD-R space for file storage. Thus, no hard disk drive necessary. Those features, and the fact that the minimum requirements for use are PC’s with Pentium 200MMX and 64MB RAM (with swap partition), make Puppy Linux something that should be seriously considered for student/school use.
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I love these mini-distros, too. Recently somebody hacked/defaced my blog. I took it off the network, booted into Damn Small Linux (DSL) from CD, mounted the hard drive and dumped my db and important files to a pen drive. I then formatted the hard drive and reinstalled the OS.
Unfortunately, I have not had luck in getting Dell laptops to boot Puppy Linux or DSL from USB pen drives :(.
I have been playing with the writeback liveCD Puppy Linux 1.04. Its pretty easy to use, and while pushing it a bit it can be downloaded by those on dialup. It has support for Lucent LT winmodems and some other brand of winmodem, which is good because the only computer availible to me at the moment has the lucent modem. It doesn’t quite replace a full distro, but it does allow doing the usual tasks. I have not tried to set up printing for the lexmark Z705 on this box, so I don’t know how well that works.
Puppy linux is fast and running; now, what we need is learning how to use
Skype, amsn or any other good instant messenger along with PUPPY LINUX and get a webcam installed. If Puppy linux ever learns how to detect webcams fast and have a preinstalled instant messenger that works well, we are going to happily bark forever after.