Puppy Linux is a live CD but also can be a desktop replacement; actually, Puppy Linux was created with the mission of being easy to install to USB, Zip or hard drive.
Booting:
In this process, Puppy asks us about some options like country (or region) and some screens for configuring the graphic server (the options are Xorg and Xvesa); screen resolution and color depth must be also selected; now we are ready for the real thing.
Desktop:
"Woof, woof" is the welcome sound that we get when we see the desktop. These sounds tell us that the audio system is up and running.
The general view is nice and only one click is needed to open the applications; after the click, speed is very impressive, even in our Armada M700.
Despite his size (82,6 Mb iso image) the software selection is also very interesting. The word processor we find is Abiword, which is not as versatile as OpenOffice Writer, but it has everything that the average user needs. We have also found the Gnumeric spreadsheet application.
In this version Mozilla-Firefox is not available, but instead we have found the Seamonkey suite (browser, HTML editor, e-mail client and address book); we were surprised to see that flash support is available out of the box as well as support for mpeg, quicktime, msvideo and ogg.
Kernel:
2.6.21.5 for this version.
System configuration:
The network connection is not working out of the box, but Puppy has a very easy to use application to do the networking setup.
This is done step by step starting with the driver selection and then the network parameters. It is also possible to use the same application for configuring a wireless network.
Hard disk installation:
The Universal Installer is ready to help us to do the job and we have options for installing it to the hard disk, USB drive, flash IDE drive or internal ZIP/LS1200. Instructions are very simple and the installer guides us step by step towards a successful installation.
System shutdown.
Before shutting down Puppy ask us if we want to save the changes we made in this session, so we can have the same system in the next boot.
Final considerations:
Extremely friendly, Puppy Linux is recommended for new users. Configuration options are perfectly understandable and the user shouldn't have any unexpected problems with Puppy.
Thanks to its speed, this distribution can be used to bring new life to old computers like our M700.
It is possible to run Puppy Linux almost from any media and also side by side with any other distribution you may have in your hard disk . . . very impressive!
Release notes
Puppy at DistroWatch
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