Is That a Puppy in Your Pocket?

A retired university lecturer in Australia has come up with the latest twist on Linux, fielding a distribution of the operating system that takes little memory and can boot directly off of a USB thumb drive.

Although Puppy Linux began life more as a demonstration than a full Linux distribution, it has rapidly evolved into a real workhorse distribution whose completeness is astonishing. Yet despite that evolution, Puppy Linux's focus on ease-of-use remains one of its major strengths -- to the point where it provides more hand-holding than some experienced Linux users might like.