Puppy Linux 4.2.1 is not a Puppy, it's a Poppa to Many!
Puppy has long been the posterboy for all those who needed a light distribution. However, I never really tried it before. I was happy in the crowd of biggies like Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mepis and Ubuntu. This morning I downloaded Puppy Linux 4.2.1 (puppy-4.2.1-k2.6.25.16-seamonkey.iso, the incremental .1 is a bugfix) just like that. And Lo! After popping it on my notebook, it a sort of stunned me for its beauty, simplicity, speed, usability, wealth of applications, and overall integration of the whole.
It is an independent distribution on diet by JWM and a careful selection of applications for almost any task you do on your home desktop.
It has around 170 odd ones including a word processor (Abiword), spreadsheet program (Gnumeric), batch renamer, download manager, torrent client, IM client, media player, vector and rastor graphics program, ftp client, archiver, copy disk tool, cd/dvd/brd burner, iso image editor, audio ripper, sticky note utility... and a lot lot more that it seemed more comprehensive than the complete Fedora 10 DVD. You name it, and it has a slimmed down version of it. All of them packed in just 100MB. God! Is it a miracle?
The most astounding part of this tiny distro is that all the tools, applications and utilities it has work flawlessly. No wonder, at #8 on the distrowatch ranking it is outdoing many heavyweights.
As for the beauty, Puppy does the best JWM. It is sure to allure you with a grey color theme and shiny orange icons.
It seems "Puppy is actually a Poppa" (Daddy). It has it all. It is a must for everybody, especially for those who want to breath new life into their rather old Desktops/Notebooks.
