Puppy Linux is an evolutionary operating
system, based on GNU Linux. What's different here is that Puppy is
extraordinarily small, yet quite full featured. Puppy Linux can boot
into a 64MB ramdisk, and that's it, the whole caboodle runs in RAM.
Unlike
live CD distributions that have to keep pulling stuff off the CD, Puppy
in its entirety loads into RAM. This means that all applications start
in the blink of an eye and respond to user input instantly.
Puppy
Linux has the ability to boot off a flash card or any USB memory device
(flash-Puppy), CDROM (live-Puppy), Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk
(zippy-Puppy), floppy disks (floppy-Puppy), internal hard drive
(hard-Puppy).
Puppy occupies about 50-60M on my USB Flash drive, CDROM, or whatever is the storage media.
When
Puppy boots, everything uncompresses into a RAM area that we call a
"ramdisk". The live-CD will bootup on systems with only 32M RAM, but the
more RAM you have the more Puppy is able to keep files permanently in
ramdisk hence more speed. A PC with 128M RAM is the recommended minimum.
Note
that Puppy will automatically use a swap partition if it exists. When
booting from a USB Flash device, Puppy tries to load all the Flash files
into physical RAM, but if there is not enough RAM then Puppy is able to
copy the excess to a swap partition if it exists. This eliminates
writes to the Flash memory during a session, greatly extending its life
span.
You may need to have a swap partition to run Firefox or
Mozilla on PCs with less than 64M RAM. Certainly, for a PC with only 32M
RAM, a swap partition is necessary to run most of the large GUI
applications.
Download Puppy Linux 5.2.8
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