A new era for Puppy Linux -- 4.00 is here

One of the best live CD projects out there, Puppy Linux, has kicked it up a definite notch with the announcement of Puppy 4.00.

I began using Puppy with 2.13, and it has always performed extremely well. Here is one of the changes in 4.00:

Puppy 3.01 was built from Slackware-12 binary packages, however to reduce the size 4.00 has been totally compiled from source, using the T2-project. Thus, less dependencies (smaller size) and later versions of packages than 3.01.

The main 4.00 release uses the 2.6.21.7 kernel -- same as 3.01 -- but there's also a version with 2.6.25. One note in the announcement says that some older PCs boot better with the newer kernel, so it might be a good idea to try both.

Another thing I read in the announcement is that there's a new Puppy 2.14R, which is an update to the original Puppy 2.14 with "the latest features of Puppy." That's also good. I remember 2.14 as being a very good release, even though I still boot 2.13 on occasion.

And the Puppy team is committed to keeping the Puppy 3 series going, with version 3.02 of the Slackware 12-compatible distro on the way.

Again, Puppy is a great project that's just getting better with each new release. Aside from my affinity for 2.13, I use 3.00 all the time on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450). I would've upgraded to 3.01, but I never had a problem with 3.00, so I've stuck with it.