| Puppy Linux 2.10 says "woof" |
Sep. 14, 2006
 Distro founder and chief maintainer Barry Kauler on Sept. 13 announced availability of the Puppy Linux 2.10 live CD. The latest version of the Australia-based distro features a 2.6.16.7 Linux kernel, the JWM desktop windowing environment, and a "massive" package upgrade.
Some of the key new features, as listed by Kauler and the project team, include:- A massive upgrade of most package versions, including Abiword 2.4.5, Gnumeric 1.6.3, Seamonkey 1.0.4, GTK 2.8.17, Xorg 7.0, and many others
- Most of the packages are now compiled using the T2 build system. T2 is a set of build scripts for compiling a distro from source
- The "devx" module, file devx_210.sfs, is a simple method of converting Puppy into a complete C/C++ compile environment. There is now a more formal construction of this file, compared with previous ad-hoc approach.
- Squashfs now has LZMA compression, allowing us to put more packages into this release, yet the live-CD iso file is smaller
- Many more building-block libraries and utilities -- particularly for multimedia, such as dvdauthor, ffmpeg, lcms, libdvdplay, libdvdread, libsamplerate, libsndfile, madplay, readline, bc, sqlite, reiserfsprogs, rutilt, vamps, and vobcopy
- Smartlink and Lucent soft-modem drivers and support utilities are now in the live CD
- Sweep replaces mhWaveEdit sound recorder and editor
- InkLite vector editor replaces the full Inkscape.
Additionally, many more packages can be installed later via the "PupGet" utility, such as NVU, Firefox, and Thunderbird. The default office suite is GNOME Office.
"Regarding bugs, there are some that we know of that will be fixed later," Kauler noted in the release announcement.
Australia-based Puppy's most redeeming feature is that it has a small footprint yet is full-featured, including all sorts of configuration and application installation wizards. The whole OS is small enough to run directly from system RAM. The result is that all applications start quickly and respond to user input instantly. Another advantage is that Puppy can often be a great choice for older, under-powered hardware.
The live CD iso file (66.6MB) can be downloaded here.
You can view some screen shots, courtesy of OSDir.com, here.
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