Puppy Linux is one of the most popular thumb drive Linux distributions. What that means is the entire operating system weighs in at less than 100MB, and can be run on any computer just by plugging in a USB flash drive. But unlike some thumb drive distros, Puppy Linux provides such a robust desktop experience that you could seriously make a case for running Puppy as your primary operating system, at least on older machines with slow processors and small hard drives.
Puppy Linux 4.0 Dingo is the latest version of Puppy, and it packs all the usual goodies like the SeaMonkey internet suite (which is a Mozilla product with a Firefox-like web browser), AbiWord word processor, and Gnumeric spreadsheet application. But there are also a bunch of improvements over Puppy 3, including:
Support for scanners and digital cameras
Audio recording, editing, and conversion software
New GTK2 applications including ePDFView, Pschedule, Pcdripper, Pburn, and Pnethood
Automatic selection of native screen resolutions for LCD monitors
A new theme and background
Puppy 4.0 uses the same 2.6.21.7 kernel as Puppy 3, which was released 6 months ago. But there’s an optional version of Puppy 4.0 that uses the 2.6.25 kernel for bleeding edge types. Some Puppy features have been reported not to work as well with the newer kernel.
[via eeextra]