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The Most Lightweight Distro

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PCQ Bureau
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Puppy Linux is a fresh build of Linux which is small in size and helps make computing easy and fast. The distro is capable of persistent write back to the installation media if the CD is multisession and a CD-RW is present, a feature which is not so common among other distros. Puppy is really is small. The live-CD is typically 85MB, yet there is a complete set of GUI applications. Being so small, it loads completely into RAM. Therefore, old PCs that no longer work with new systems will work with Puppy. It is also useful as a rescue disk, a demonstration system, leaving the original/existing operating system unaltered, or even as an OS to a system with a blank or missing hard drive, or for keeping old computers useful.

Features

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The distro features built-in tools which can be used to create bootable USB drives, create new Puppy CDs, or remaster a new live CD with different packages. Applications such as AbiWord (a free Word processing application), Gnumeric (a spreadsheet) and MPlayer games (a free multimedia player), image editors are included. Extra software is in the form of dotpets. There is a GUI Puppy Software Installer included. Puppy Linux enables you to recover data from destroyed PCs or by removing malware from Windows. The distro can be used in removing malware from a system.

Requirements

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Puppy Linux has the ability to boot off a flash card or any USB memory device, CDROM, Zip disk or internal hard drive. Everything in the Puppy package uncompresses into a RAM area called the "RAMdisk". This is helpful as the CD (DVD) drive is then ca be used for other purposes. The PC needs to have at least 128 MB of RAM (with no more than 8 MB shared video) for Puppy Linux 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 less effectively, left on the CD. It is also possible to save all files to an external hard drive, USB stick, or even a floppy disk instead of the root file system. Puppy can also be installed to a hard disk.

Persistent Write Back Capability

Since Puppy Linux fundamentally runs in RAM, all the files, operations and configurations that are created/ modified in a session would disappear when the system is shut down. However, it is possible to save files upon shutdown. This feature allows the user to either save the file to disk (USB, HDD, etc.) or even write the file system to the same CD Puppy has booted from, if "multisession" was used to create the booted CD and if a CD burner was present. Puppy automatically detects changes in the file system and saves them incrementally on the disc. This helps in portability of programs and changes as done on one system. The user can simply put the CD onto another system and start his work where he left. For more info, go to http://puppylinux.org/.

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