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Puppy Linux will fit on a USB stick and gives legacy systems a new lease of life.

Puppy Linux 4.00 was recompiled from scratch with some support from the T2 (Open Source System development environment) project. GTK+ 1.x and Tcl/Tk were replaced by GTK+ 2.x.

Along with these changes, the distribution offers a fair amount of new software. For example, Puppy 4.00, codename Dingo, now includes the ePDFView PDF viewer, the Pschedule cron GUI and the Osmo organizer. Multimedia additions include the CD Rippers Pcdripper and RipOff, the mhWaveEdit audio editor, the Pburn burning application and the Fotox image viewer. The programs HomeBank and ExpenseTracker give users the ability to manage their personal finances, and Figaro's Password Manager 2 adds password management.

Puppy 4.00 is based on kernel 2.6.21.7 and includes applications for almost any purpose in addition to the new tools. Berry Kauler has put Abiword 2.4.6, Gnumeric 1.7.13 and InkscapeLite 0.36 on the CD for office tasks. Seamonkey 1.1.8, Sylpheed 2.4.7 and Pidgin 2.4.1 give users access to Internet functionality. The JWM window manager takes care of organizing the desktop.

Despite the new features and extended functionality, Puppy Linux 4.00 has a smaller footprint, weighing in at 12MB below its predecessor Linux 3.0.1. With its footprint of just 87.1MB, Puppy Dingo will easily fit on a business card CD, or a USB stick, and will run on older machines. The mini distribution is available for downloading from the Puppy website and various mirror servers.

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