The new puppy...

I've got a new puppy...
He's small but nimble. And he can boot and run from a CD, 128MB flash drive, compactflash or SD card.

I'm talking about puppy linux, a new, small (70MB) distribution. Barry Kauler started playing around with the idea around 2003. He just recently released version 2.02, and it's a very, very interesting idea.

I've played around with linux for a short time in the past. I've tried Red Hat and Corel Linux early on, but was quickly turned off the products when windows seemed to be the easier choice. Colel Linux installed well, but I had problems looking for software (WINE) wasn't very popular at the time and everything just seemed more complicated. Same with Red Hat, which didn't install at all.

But puppy...i downloaded the .iso image, burned a cd, rebooted - and there it was, running on my PC in about two minutes! I was astounded at how easy it installed. Then I tried to setup my DSL - and it worked! It's not just small and fast, but also easy to use and fully featured.

I've been inspired by the pup to rediscover my geek side. It's an interesting alternative to Windows - it'll work with old hardware with very minimal resources - It doesn't even need a hard drive. Just about the only quirk it requires is a relatively generous amount of RAM - 128MB is recommended. It can also use a swapfile on a hard drive if RAM is insufficient. (But that means you need to have a hard drive) Now 128 MB is standard for today's computers if you run XP. If your setup is older (pre-XP) then you can easily add on memory. Prices of 128MB PC-133 are around 500 pesos, used, so its not that expensive.

It can run as a live CD/DVD - if your computer has a CD or DVD burner, you can run a multisession CD (the ordinary 10 peso kind) it will boot up, and then it can save your user files on the same CD. Or on a network, or a thumb drive or compact flash card on USB. One can have a computer with just a motherboard and a stick of memory. All you need is a large enough (say, 1 gig) flash drive and you are good to go. No floppy drive, no HDD, NO CD drive necessary.

It's fast and zippy. It's a puppy!




Check out the puppy at this link