Puppy Linux is a small and fast Linux Distor designed to run from a USB Drive with the goal been to plug into any computer (say at work) and then work outside the confines of Windows plus take your work with you. In line with Cloud OS – I choose to give this a try and see how it coped and was it a workable system?

Download the ISO

The first thing I did was download the ISO and instead of trying to follow various guides on installing this a USB Stick or wasting a CD-R, I went for plan F – I Installed it inside a Virtual Machine (VMWare in my case). One it had booted up, there was an option to install to a USB Sitck, I had already mounted a 512MB Stick (first thing I picked up) and followed the screens.

Now to test it

I Booted a Laptop from USB and it went through the very same screens as the ISO did – seleting Keyboard and the like but at the Video screen, where the virtual machines worked fine – this fell over, maybe as it had ATI Gfx card? I did get a graphical screen up but it was low resolution and very slow – I am missing the point of this program, can I not plug it into ANY machine and it works?

Thoughts

Thee is already a way to make Ubuntu 9.10 run from a USB Stick and use some of the space for Virtual memory / Harddrive, this works better then this Puppy Linux thing for sure. There is two train of thoughts here for portable Operating Systems:

• Cloud based to run inside a browser on any machine – using the OS already installed to run from (Google OS etc)
• Bootable USB version – by-pass the installed OS to run a version of Linux – all work is local.