Linux Lite: 5 Tiny Distros That Pack A Big Bang

5

Puppy Linux 3.01

Everything a tiny Linux distribution should be, and then some.

I confess I have a deeply personal attachment to Puppy Linux. I used an earlier version of the OS to resurrect a laptop that had been sitting in my father's closet for years on end, and pretty much fell in love with it during that time. Few other distributions combine both the small-and-light and get-work-done approach as effectively as Puppy does. It's one of those distributions that reminds me what Linux is supposed to be all about.

The 3.0 revision of Puppy is a fairly major reworking of the system, designed to make it binary- and package-compatible with Slackware 12, with an .ISO that fits into just over 100 Mbytes. You don't need to have experience with Slackware, or much of any Linux distribution, to take the Puppy out for a run. Boot the CD, choose a keyboard mapping and the X server (Xvesa or Xorg, which you can always change later), and you're at a fully functional desktop with applications, system tools, and install / setup scripts.

The live CD can be used as-is, or you can install Puppy to a storage device -- not just a hard drive, but anything from an Iomega Zip drive to a USB-mounted Compact Flash card. The "Frugal" installation option lets you install Puppy as a set of files on an existing partition, which lets Puppy coexist with another distro; a Frugal install is booted like a live CD and runs entirely in RAM. Another option is to boot the system from CD, make any desired changes, and then re-burn the entire live file system back to CD.

Puppy provides wizards for common setup and administrative functions, like configuring the network. Some of these wizards lack polish in their workflow and wording -- it's not always clear what the consequences of clicking a particular button are, for instance, and sometimes the wizard will vanish entirely for seconds on end while it processes something in the background. But the wizards do a solid job of covering most of the things people never want to touch with bare hands, like the X-server configuration or setting up wireless networking.

One of the things I like most about Puppy is how it provides you with the things you need to get work done, not only right out of the box, but right on the desktop itself. AbiWord, InkScapeLite, mtPaint, and the Seamonkey suite are provided as default choices for word processing, vector graphics, raster graphics, and Web browsing/e-mail/HTML editing tools, respectively. If you don't like them, though, you can always dig into Puppy's package repository and replace them. I swapped Seamonkey for Firefox and added Thunderbird for e-mail without any issues (the most recent version available in the repository for both was 2.0.0.4). I also liked the spate of logically named, pre-created folders in the user's root directory -- my-applications, my-documents, and so forth.

Fans of Puppy have turned out various "Puplets," or variations on the original Puppy to meet specific needs -- like the even more stripped-down "Empty Crust" or the graphically-oriented "Grafpup." That kind of enthusiasm is a sign that the Puppy Linux people are doing something right.

6

Conclusions

Out of this batch of five, Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux impressed me the most -- the former for being the most immediately useful for personal productivity and for resurrecting older machines, and the latter for its combination of sheer compactness and versatility. I also liked SLAX for its webconfig feature and NimbleX for its remarkable online and offline customizability (try the builder on the Web site!). And of course Knoppix is the wellspring for many a slimmed-down live-CD distribution, but stands nicely on its own, too.