Puppy Linux 4.00 Has Been Released

The development team of Puppy Linux has announced availability of new release of Puppy Linux, a major updated of the minimalist desktop distribution. Its the 4.00 version.

For who don't know, Puppy Linux is yet another Linux distribution. What's different here is that Puppy is extraordinarily small, yet quite full featured. Puppy boots into a 64MB ram disk, 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, CDROM, Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk, floppy disks, internal hard drive. It can even use a multi session formatted CD-R/DVD-R to save everything back to the CD/DVD with no hard drive required at all!

Now, this Puppy has all drivers built-in for scanning, digital camera, printing (Gutenprint), audio recording/editing/conversion, making it a complete multimedia environment ...yet is only 87.1 MB!!! Of course this is in addition to being a complete office environment, in addition to having a huge collection of useful utilities, in addition to anything else you can think of...

Alternative 4.00 live-CD with 2.6.25 kernel
The 'standard' build of Puppy 4.00 is file puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso, which is 87.1MB, compare that with Puppy 3.01 'standard' (with much less functionality) which is 98.6MB!

The team have also built puppy-4.00-k2.6.25-seamonkey.iso, using the latest Linux kernel. This may not be quite as mature for wireless network connectivity though. Choose this one if you want support for a dual-core CPU (but the 'standard' build with mono-core 2.6.21.7 kernel works on dual-core systems). Also, strangely enough, we have more success booting older PCs with the 2.6.23 and later kernels, so try this one if Puppy fails to boot.

The 2.6.25 kernel is configured with the unified /dev/sd* and /dev/sr* drive naming, which may cause some difficulty if you need to configure GRUB.

For more information about Puppy Linux can be reached on its site. Btw, you can download ISO of this new Puppy Linux (only 87 MB) at here.