Developers unleash Puppy Linux

Software developers have unveiled a Linux distribution which, complete with all essential applications, take up less than 50MB of disc space.

Dubbed Puppy Linux, the latest 0.9.9, multi-session 1.0.0 alpha version of the operating system can be booted from CD, USB key drive, Flash drive, local or network drive.

Booting from CD, Puppy will load totally into Ram so that the CD drive is then free for other purposes.

At the end of the session all altered files in the user's home directory are written back to CD. This means that the next time the OS is booted from this CD all user specific settings are automatically restored.

"When Puppy boots, everything un-compresses into a Ram area that we call a 'ramdisk'. The live CD will boot up on systems with only 32MB Ram, but the more Ram you have the more Puppy is able to keep files permanently in ramdisk, hence more speed. A PC with 128MB Ram is the recommended minimum," the distro's developers state.

Included in the astonishingly small disc footprint of 50MB, in addition to the operating system, are text editors, word processors, a web browser, two graphics applications, a WYSIWYG presentation program, games, personal information management tools and a raft of utilities.

Puppy Linux can be downloaded here.

See also:

Novell and IBM push Linux to ISVs

Resources, tools and expertise for open source developers  17 Mar 2005

Open source

Linux is becoming the operating system of choice for an increasing number of corporates, and even the mighty Microsoft is acknowledging the threat ...  12 May 2004

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