About Puppy

Puppy's goals

Easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media. Booting from CD (or DVD), the CD drive is then free for other purposes. Booting from CD (or DVD), save everything back to the CD. Booting from USB Flash drive, minimise writes to extend life indefinitely. Extremely friendly for Linux newbies. Boot up and run extraordinarily fast. Have all the applications needed for daily use. Will just work, no hassles. Will breathe new life into old PCs Load and run totally in RAM for diskless thin stations

These are extraordinary goals, yet Puppy comes close to achieving them all. The fundamental reason is that Puppy has been built from scratch, file-by-file, and is not based on any other Linux distribution. One of the most amazing features of Puppy is the range of powerful applications yet such tiny size ...and the speed.

Puppy really is small, the live-CD typically being 85MB, yet there really is a complete set of GUI applications. Being so small, Puppy usually loads completely into RAM, which accounts for the incredible speed.

Well, we can rave on, which is something Puppy-enthusiasts are prone to, but find out for yourself! Um, how about some entertaining links:

Lobster's website has a Puppy slideshow: Jan2015: Link removed
Then there's the "Puppy Linux song":

The creator of Puppy
Barry Kauler created Puppy Linux, bringing out version 0.1 in June 2003. This site, puppylinux.com is maintained by Barry. These days though, the overall Puppy-project is a team effort, with many developers and testers.

The Puppy mascot
Yes, there was a real little puppy, named "Puppy", who was the inspiration for the naming of Puppy Linux.

Donate
If you fall in love with Puppy, help out in some way. This can be as simple as testing a new release and providing feedback, or can be as heavy-duty as fixing bugs and developing new applications or improving existing ones. Even just lurking on the forum and answering newbie questions is helpful. Or, putting in a good word for Puppy here and there. Or, a small cash donation may be made.

(c) Webpage copyright Barry Kauler 2008, all reproduction rights reserved.