Puppy Linux

A whole operating system installed in a little USB stick—it's almost unbelievable to think it could work. Projects such as Puppy Linux make this possible. I installed BookwormPup64 which is I guess one of their "main" distros based on the latest version of Debian.

Puppy Linux is a family of Linux distributions that are built to be extremely minimal in storage and resource usage, allowing it to run on very low-performance hardware. The whole OS fresh out of the box takes up as low as 500 MB. This puppy install that I've already set up takes up just a little over 1 GB.

How it works is that the whole operating system gets copied over to the computer's RAM, and the system only writes to the drive at the end of a session. This makes it really good for drives that are on their deathbed and flimsy little flash memory drives like SD cards and USB sticks.

Puppy Linux distros aren't like your typical Linux desktop operating system. It has its own ways of doing things in terms of system and package management. It's still confusing for me since their wiki isn't very user-friendly and it seems like their forum is the main source of information for newbies. But I really like it since it's pretty complete out of the box.

I didn't have a strong reason to install a Puppy on my flashdrive aside from it would be really cool. As a consequence, I now have a whole operating system that I can boot into on any computer (as long as I can disable Secure Boot in its BIOS). All my files and apps and cool wallpaper would be in it. It could turn any old crappy Windows 7 home computer into a quick snappy Linux one.

A unique thing about Puppy Linux is that they're set up with "frugal installs". That way, the entire Puppy install can be stored in a single folder instead of the typical 20 or so root directories. Dayflower's Puppy is located in the /puppy folder. At the end of every session, whatever work done in the Puppy session is saved into a save folder or save file within /puppy. This save folder or file gets encrypted so you can't access any of the personal files in the Puppy install unless you boot into the install.

An operating system needs a bootloader to boot. Since I formatted Dayflower with an MBR (Master Boot Record) partition table, the bootloader is installed in the same single partition as everything else. I don't think I could move these files so they're just scattered around alongside my other files, making it a little messy. Losing any of these boot files may prevent me from booting into my Puppy install, but that's easily fixable with another Puppy live ISO, which I can simply use to install new boot files into Dayflower.

A whole bootable system can be useful in case my laptop runs out of battery while I'm at campus and I don't have a way to charge it. I can boot into my own system using a library computer without needing to completely sign into my work/school/personal accounts on a foreign system. Etc.