Puppy 2.13 (i386)

Puppy is extraordinarily small, yet quite full featured. Puppy boots 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, CDROM, Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk, floppy disks, internal hard drive. It can even use a multisession formatted CD-R/DVD-R to save everything back to the CD/DVD with no hard drive required at all. Features for Puppy 2.13:

• Ndiswrapper, which allows Windows XP wireless network drivers to be used in Linux, was broken in Puppy 2.12. I have upgraded to Ndiswrapper v1.33, which fixes the problem.
• Geany text editor upgraded to v0.10.
• Isomaster ISO file editor tool upgraded to v0.6.
• Sigmund (zigbert on the Forum) has created a couple of little GUI gems: PuppyBackup v0.6.3 for backing up to CD/DVD/HD and PuppyMirror v0.1 for syncing directories.
• SeaMonkey upgraded to v1.0.6. The 'profile roaming' extension and an extension for editing Cascading StyleSheets in Composer have been added.
• At first shutdown the user chooses to save personal settings and data in a file, that we call 'pup_save.3fs'. This file internally had a ext3 filesystem, however for various technical reasons we have changed to a ext2 filesystem. New personal storage files will now be called 'pup_save.2fs', where the '2' indicates ext2.
• The Puppy live-CD is created from a pool of packages that we call the Unleashed suite. Individual packages from this pool that are not in the live-CD can be installed later. We used to call the installer the PupGet package manager and the packages PupGet packages. The individual Unleashed packages are available for download and are 'tarballs' (compressed files) with the '.tar.gz' extension. These packages are now called PET packages, the package manager is called PETget and the files have the extension '.pet'.
• PET packages can now be installed from ROX-Filer. Download a PET package, click on it, and it will be installed. Currently only 'official' PET packages from the Unleashed suite are available, but it is expected that 'unofficial' PETs will soon become available.
• PETget now has more powerful dependency checking. The idea is, you install a PET package and any missing dependency is determined and installed.
• The Xorg Video Wizard now has hardware profiling. For the end-user it is extremely simple. At bootup if there is new video hardware the Xorg Wizard will automatically run. But, if you change the video hardware back to something that you had used earlier, Puppy will remember and automatically use the correct profile. So, Puppy booting off a USB Flash stick can be used on several different PCs and the Video Wizard only runs once each time.
• The Rutilt wireless configuration GUI application is now upgraded to version 0.13.
• ROX-Filer, our main file manager and also the manager of the icons on the desktop, has been upgraded from v1.2.2 to v2.5. This is a major upgrade and required a lot of work. GuestToo and NathanF had considerable input to this.
• At first shutdown, the dialog windows have been simplified and made easier to use.
• In Puppy 2.12, the 'modprobe' binary executable was renamed to 'modprobe.bin' and 'modprobe' is now a script. This script will transparently fetch kernel modules, firmware and associated executables from a separate file called 'zdrv_xxx.sfs'. I have fixed some bugs in the 'modprobe' script and improved the speed of loading modules.
• The venerable Gimp-Print v4.2.7 has been upgraded to GutenPrint v5.0.0. This gives support for over 300 printers.
• Puppy is going international! I have replaced the Bitstream Vera fonts with the DejaVu sans-serif fonts. DejaVu is based upon Bitstream but with greatly expanded international language support.
• Plus lots of small bug fixes and improvements.