A Review of Puppy Linux

I have an interesting problem. I want to run linux at work, but don't want to lose the space on my laptop. The solution? Use a live-cd linux distro. At the same time, I'm not looking for too much and so a full blown live-cd distro like knoppix would be overkill.

So, it was going to be a small distro. What's also nice about small distros are that they are extremely easy to use. They aren't bloated (Hey! how much can you fit into 50 MB) and they still seem to have the necessary bits plugged in. I found a few and had shortlisted it down to DSL and Puppy Linux. I gave DSL a try before switching over to Puppy Linux. Don't get me wrong, I liked DSL quite a bit but I found some of the features on Puppy Linux quite a bit better.

Some of the things I really liked about Puppy Linux was its support for the 2.6 Kernel and thereby pretty decent support for hardware. Since I have a laptop, WLAN connectivity is a must and that's what I wanted from Puppy Linux. I gave a good RTFM before actually trying it out and expected Wifi to work out of the box. It didn't. It took me a *lot* of time and effort before I realized that I need to download and install an additional package which patches the Wifi connectivity for my laptop. This wasn't as bad as it seems because of a really cool feature that the distro has - multi session live CD. Basically, this feature allows for software to be installed on top of the same cd and not just that, it allows file modifications to be saved as well. This really is a superb solution, because it gives the illusion of a read/write filesystem on what is actually a read only media. Naturally, this doesn't come for free and the more you save, the longer it takes to boot.

There are a lot more features than just this. Puppy Linux runs off a ramdisk, and so you can remove the Live-CD once it boots. This frees up the CD ROM drive. Plus, this distro makes replication really really easy. All you need to do, is pop in a different CD, and save and it gives a new CD with all the software. This is still a bit unstable though, and I had some problems when I used it, but I does work.

On the whole, I really liked Puppy Linux. Its easy to use and some of its features are seriously cool. No doubt I would be spending more time on it trying to customize it to my liking and yet try to keep things as simple as possible.