I love Puppy Linux so I might be a bit biased here. Puppy Linux has been one of my favorite distributions for quite some time now. It’s not only small and lightweight but offers almost everything a user could want in a tiny 100MB footprint! A perfectly viable alternative to Puppy Linux is DSL (Damn Small Linux), offering a great selection of tools to help get an ancient or crashed system back up on its feet. Often used as a system recovery tool, DSL has a tiny 50MB footprint, is well maintained, and is never a bad choice for breathing life back into that ancient laptop sitting in your closet collecting dust.
My “I Feel the Need for Speed” Recommendations:
Puppy Linux
Puppy Linux was first released in 2003 and takes pride in the fact it has no formal structure or agenda. You are given the freedom to, pretty much, do what you want with the OS (Operating System.) Isn’t that what Open Source is all about?
With Puppy Linux you are able to re-master your own version of the OS, aptly called a Puplet, and then use that customized Puppy Linux as your OS. We will not go in-depth about these customization options, as this is not the main focus of this article, but once we have you up and running on your USB Key I recommend taking a closer look at what Puppy Linux has to offer in the area of customization. Like DSL (Damn Small Linux) Puppy Linux has a simplified GUI but offers a slightly better visual experience.
DSL (Damn Small Linux)
DSL began as the quest of one man to see how many Linux desktop applications he could fit inside a 50MB Live CD. Over time it has grown into what it is today, a nearly complete desktop system that can run fully in your computers memory, requiring as little as 128MB of RAM. I highly recommend this distribution if you intend on using your Linux USB Key on older hardware and/or prefer a simplified GUI.