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Puppy Linux is an extraordinarily small, full featured operating system. Puppy boots 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 Mission Statement:
- Puppy will easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media
- Booting from CD, Puppy will load totally into RAM so that the CD drive is then free for other purposes
- Puppy will be extremely friendly for Linux newbies
- Puppy will boot up and run extraordinarily fast
- Puppy will have all the applications needed for daily use
- Puppy will just work, no hassles
- Puppy will breathe new life into old PCs
These are extraordinary goals, yet Puppy achieves them all. Obviously, some objectives have qualifications, for example, to load totally into RAM the PC must have either 128M RAM or failing that a swap partition. Also, the "will just work, no hassles"objective is a work-in-progress!
One thing to be very much aware of is that Puppy is incredibly small. After all, to load totally into RAM and run from there, Puppy has to be small. The live CD is about 100 MB, while "every"application you need is there -- I'm quite serious -- it doesn't seem possible, but it is. Furthermore, as everything runs in RAM, there are no delays and the speed is nothing short of astounding.
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