Features
Puppy Linux is a full-fledged operating system, bundled with a collection of application suites for a wide variety of tasks suitable for general use. Puppy is small-sized, so it can boot from many types of media. It is also useful as a rescue disk, a demonstration system, leaving the original/existing operating system unaltered, or as an OS to a system with a blank or missing hard drive, or for keeping old computers useful.
Puppy can boot from:
- A live USB, including USB flash drives or any other bootable USB storage device (flash-Puppy)
- A live CD (live-Puppy)
- An SD card or built in Flash drive
- A Zip drive or LS-120/240 SuperDisk
- An internal hard disk drive
- A computer network (thin-Puppy)
- An emulator (emulated-puppy)
- A floppy boot disk that loads the rest of the operating system from a USB drive, CD-ROM, or internal hard drive
Puppy Linux features built-in tools which can be used to create bootable USB drives, create new Puppy CDs, or remaster a new live CD with different packages.
Puppy Linux has a unique feature which sets it apart from other Linux distributions: the ability to offer a normal persistently updating working environment on a write-once multisession CD/DVD. (It does not require a rewritable CD/DVD.) Puppy automatically detects changes in the file system and saves them incrementally on the disc. This feature works particularly well with DVDs, partly because of the much larger space available. While other distributions offer Live CD versions of their operating systems, they do not allow programs to be permanently added nor do they allow files to be written to the CD.
Puppy also features sophisticated write-caching system designed to extend the life of USB flash drives that Puppy Linux runs from.
Unlike some other OSes, Puppy Linux does not mount (i.e. prepare to read from/write to) hard drives or connect to the network automatically. This reduces the odds that a bug or even intentionally added incompatible software corrupts the contents of a hard drive. Puppy Linux can also run on ARM platform and also on a single board computer such as Raspberry Pi.
Since Puppy Linux fundamentally runs in RAM, all the files, operations and configurations that are created/modified in a session would disappear when the system is shut down. However, it is possible to save files upon shutdown. This feature allows the user to either save the file to disk (USB, HDD etc.) or even write the file system to the same CD Puppy has booted from, if "multisession" was used to create the booted CD and if a CD burner is present. This is true for CD-Rs as well as CD-RWs and DVDs.
It is also possible to save all files to an external hard drive, USB stick, or even a floppy disk instead of the root file system. Puppy can also be installed to a hard disk.
Read more about this topic: Puppy Linux
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)