Puppy Linux 6.0................
A fast, lightweight distro that will delight newcomers and users of older machines.
Perhaps it’s the name, or maybe it’s the team of developers, but Puppy Linux seems to have mastered the art of being likeable. The lightweight distro has picked up several tricks since its initial release 11 years ago, but it’s still fun, fast, friendly and reliably robust.
Codenamed Tahrpup, the latest Puppy Linux is shipped as a live, installable image. The project offers two 199MB images – PAE and non-PAE. The former is for machines which have more than 4GB RAM.
The distro uses JWM as its window manager and provides quick access to all the apps, which are all neatly filed away into categories, such as Personal, Utilities, Internet and Multimedia.
While most lightweight distros are usually also minimalist, Tahrpup sometimes features apps that provide extra functionality. This is most evident under the Internet and Multimedia menus, where you’ll find several file sharing apps and music players.
The distro ships with the Sylpheed email client and the Firefox- based Pale Moon is the default browser. While Flash isn't installed by default, the browser is equipped to serve streaming videos. You get AbiWord and Gnumeric, by default, to work with office documents. The distro also features the PupAdvert Blocker utility for ad-free browsing.
The distro provides quick installation of popular apps. You can use the GetFlash utility to install the official AdobeFlash plugin. You can also download and set up LibreOffice using the quick install utility from under the Document menu.
Despite its small size, the distro is full of applications, some of which are unconventional. It features HomeBank, to help you manage finances, GWhere to catalogue disks, Figaro’sPassword Manager and graphical tools to manage Samba shares and setup firewalls.
If you find your favourite application missing from the impressive list of defaults, the binary compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04 means that you can use its package management tool to access Ubuntu's software repositories and install additional packages with ease. However, the QuickPet utility can be used to quickly install some of the most popular apps.
Configuring Tahrpup
The default Puppy desktop isn't internet ready. You're asked to configure the network when you first run Puppy and it provides several custom graphical tools to help you through the process.
Puppy features several custom tools with graphical wizards to help you configure the network, graphic display and printer and so on. The tools are newbie-friendly and the graphical wizards offer detailed instructions to help guide you along the way.
When you decide to end the live session, regardless of whether you run Puppy off USB or CD, it will prompt you to save the changes. If you decide to do so, Puppy will store all your settings, preferences and changes to the system to the specified path.
The distro ships with the GParted partition management tool, which comes into play if you decide to install Puppy to disk. The wizard-driven installation is one of the easiest to follow and offers plenty of information at each step to help you decide how to proceed. Tahrpup uses Grub4dos as its bootloader and lets you make changes to the configuration files, if needed, during the installation.
The distro provides several icons on the desktop to some of the frequently used apps. Instead of the app name, however, the icons are named after the function required. For example, the write icon will open AbiWord, while play opens VLC.
Despite our determined efforts, we failed to find any fleas in this pup. The distro is one of the easiest to use and install regardless of your skill level. We'd definitely recommend Puppy Linux to new users looking for a fun distro.