Puppy Linux is an evolutionary operating system, based on GNU Linux. What's different here is that Puppy is extraordinarily small, yet quite full featured. Puppy Linux can boot 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 has the ability to boot off a flash card or any USB memory device (flash-Puppy), CDROM (live-Puppy), Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk (zippy-Puppy), floppy disks (floppy-Puppy), internal hard drive (hard-Puppy).Puppy occupies about 50-60M on my USB Flash drive, CDROM, or whatever is the storage media.When Puppy boots, everything uncompresses into a RAM area that we call a "ramdisk". The live-CD will bootup on systems with only 32M RAM, but the more RAM you have the more Puppy is able to keep files permanently in ramdisk hence more speed. A PC with 128M RAM is the recommended minimum.Note that Puppy will automatically use a swap partition if it exists. When booting from a USB Flash device, Puppy tries to load all the Flash files into physical RAM, but if there is not enough RAM then Puppy is able to copy the excess to a swap partition if it exists. This eliminates writes to the Flash memory during a session, greatly extending its life span.You may need to have a swap partition to run Firefox or Mozilla on PCs with less than 64M RAM. Certainly, for a PC with only 32M RAM, a swap partition is necessary to run most of the large GUI applications.What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]· The brilliant new Puppy Linux 5.1, code-name "Lucid" as it is binary-compatible with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx packages, has been released. Lucid Puppy 5.1 is a "full-featured compact distro." It's a Puppy, so it is fast, friendly, and fun, and it can also serve as one's main Linux desktop. Quickpet and Puppy Package Manager allow easy installation of many of the best Linux programs, tested and configured for Lucid Puppy. It is just as easy to choose your favorite browser and your language. And it all looks as good as it is, because the core Lucid team now includes an Art Director. Lucid Puppy boots directly to an automatically configured graphical desktop, with the tools to personalize the desktop right at hand, and it even recommends which add-on video driver to use for high-performance graphics. The main emphasis relative to Puppy 5.0 has been to improve the user interface, both to make it even more friendly and to enhance the visual appearance. Also many packages and tools (especially for video and printing) have been upgraded/improved, including synchronising with a recent release of the Woof Puppy-builder.