PuppyLinux: About Puppy

About Puppy

Puppy Linux is a light-weight, yet fully featured, Linux distribution. It aims to be quick and useful on older machines, without sacrificing functionality. Puppy Linux is superior to other light-weight Linux distros because it has a lot of programs that haven't had featured lopped off to make them smaller.
Below are some graphical distros that are similar to Puppy in goals and design.

Under 25MB

KolibriOS∞ - (1.44Mb) An entire OS that fits on a floppy, written in assembler for x86-32; forked from MenuetOS.
SliTaz∞ - (24Mb) Live CD using Xvesa, with JWM, Firefox, EmelFM2 and some other apps. (Main page with substantial info is in French, but also some minimal info in English here∞.)

Under 50Mb

Distros under 50Mb fit onto a MiniCD.

DamnSmallLinux∞ - (<50Mb) popular distro using Knoppix hardware recognition. Based on 2.4.x kernel (puppy uses 2.6.x) Also has good way of running programs using .uci .unc
Jinx∞ - (44Mb) with Opera 9, Flash, Textmaker and Planmaker.
Austrumi∞ - (<50Mb) Austrumi is a business card size bootable live CD Linux distribution based on Slackware.
Mitrax∞ - (<50Mb) MitraX is live distro based on Slackware
Luit∞ - (<50Mb)

Under 128Mb

DamnSmallLinux-Not∞ - (84Mb) popular distro using Knoppix hardware recognition with Abiword and Gnumeric.
DeLi∞ - (<128Mb) Desktop Light
SLAX Popcorn Edition∞- (<128Mb) Quite good, It's a smaller version of SLAX∞
FeatherLinux∞ - (<128Mb) not as good, a Knoppix based distro, can't boot off read-only sticks

Under 256Mb

TinyMe∞ - (177Mb) based on pcLinuxOS
Kurumin 6 Light - (182Mb)
Slax∞ - (~200Mb) Distro based on Slackware using KDE
Runt∞- (~200Mb); future development is uncertain
TinyFlux∞ - (223Mb) based on pcLinuxOS
Featherweight∞- (<250Mb). based on Feather Linux. The goal is to be a full featured Linux that isn't bloated.
Flash Linux∞- (<256Mb) Gentoo-based, initially designed to run off of a 256Mb USB key.

Under 700Mb

Distros under 700Mb fit onto most CD-Rs.

AliXe∞ (278Mb) - Slax based
Kanotix CpxMini∞- (230Mb) quite good but 250 MB, "toram" boot option runs off ram-disk.
AntiX∞ (410Mb) MEPIS based
Kanotix Lite∞ (551Mb)
MEPISLite∞ (626Mb) MEPIS based
eLive∞ (662Mb)
SAM∞- (699Mb) SAM Linux is a LiveCD based on PCLinuxOS.

Linux is all about choice. Each distro has chosen a mix of tools and applications that suit particular users, and no one distro is better all around, although some would like to be. Make sure you choose the distro that's right for you.

"Just discovered Puppy! What a gem!" - Plockery

Reviews

Review of Small Distros∞ (2005)

1. DSL is sub-50M but is lacking many heavy-duty applications, or rather, they have to be added separately, which is really cheating as by the time you've added a few decent apps like Abiword, Mplayer, printer support, Gnumeric, or whatever, the size has blown out to something enormous. DSL does have basic applications, like Links web browser, very basic multimedia support, very basic wordprocessing, but I don't think they will satisfy you for very long. DSL is based on Knoppix and has probably the best hardware detection and under-the-hood infrastructure. For example, Perl -- I don't know how much space Perl needs in DSL, but it must be massive. DSL has minimal docs in the distro.

2. I haven't looked at Feather closely, but it is based on DSL and is about 62M. I looked through the package list, and again, the applications are extremely basic.

3. Austrumi is a very interesting distro as it has focussed on getting some really heavy-duty apps into 50M. Namely, Mplayer, Abiword (wordprocessor), Gnumeric (spreadsheet) and Opera (web browser). Abiword and Gnumeric need the GTK2 libraries and also Gnumeric needs the Gnome libraries, which are massive. So, how does Austrumi do it? -- by cutting corners elsewhere. I noticed that Abiword has been cut right down in Austrumi and cannot import/export MS DOC files. Many tools and apps that you will find in Puppy and DSL are not in Austrumi. Austrumi lacks kernel modules, limiting its hardware compatibility. Opera is also much smaller than Mozilla-based web browsers (Opera is also shareware/adware, closed source). Austrumi has the Mplayer media player (also very cut-down).

So, in what way does Puppy "fall short" compared with these distros?

Hardware detection is a work-in-progress, and will probably never catch up with DSL as the latter is based on Knoppix, whereas Puppy is built from scratch by Barry (recently with much-appreciated help from the guys on the Puppy Forum). On the other hand, being built from scratch is an advantage, as Puppy is highly optimized for smallness and speed. Puppy has the largest number of applications in the 50M distro, not as later add-ons. Puppy has over 2M of html docs included in the distro, which is unique. Puppy has Tcl/Tk which is also unique, which can be considered as a viable alternative to Perl. Puppy has shsql/Quisp, DSL has sqlite.

Comparing "heavy duty" apps bundled in the 50M distro, not as later addons, Puppy and Austrumi are way ahead. Furthermore, most of the heavy-duty apps in Puppy are, unlike Austrumi, not cut-down. Puppy has a a fully-functional Abiword wordprocessor, and fully-functional (with the full set of plugins) Gxine/Xine media player with Firefox/Mozilla plugin. In terms of the count of number of heavy-duty apps, Puppy is well ahead of Austrumi.
Okay, the above comments are from me, the developer of Puppy, so are going to be biased. So, DSL, Feather and Austrumi enthusiasts, don't get upset. Whenever anyone has asked, "which 50M distro is best", my standard reply has always been "if the cap fits, wear it". However, I am editing this page just before releasing Puppy version 0.9.9, which now features Puppy Unleashed, a tool to create your own custom Puppy out of whatever applications you want. Thus, you can have a 50M live-CD distro, that loads totally into ramdisk at bootup, blindingly fast, with your own custom selection of apps.

So, why not just admit it?

Puppy is the best!!!

See also Barry's comments on his FAQ page∞.

Info

CategoryDocumentation