Puppy Linux 4.00 Was Born

After six months in the making, since the 3.01 release, Puppy Linux comes with a brand new version, 4.00. The size was drastically reduced, due to the new way of making the distribution: all the packages were compiled from source, with the T2 project. The older release, 3.01, was built by using Slackware 12 binaries.

The developer, Barry Kauler, decided to abandon the old GTK1 and Tcl/Tk and replace them with only GTK2, to provide a much more consistent user interface and reduce Puppy's size. Because this switch was done, GTK2 replacements for some of the applications had to be found.

Here are some of the new GTK2 applications included in Puppy Linux 4.00:

• A PDF viewer called ePDFView
• Osmo, a personal organizer
• Pcdripper and RipOff, two audio CD ripping tools
• mhWaveEdit - audio editor
• MTR (traceroute)
• Pnethood, a Samba client
• Pwireless - wireless network scanner
• pStopWatch (stopwatch)
• With Homebank and ExpenseTracker you can manage your personal finances
• Fotox image viewer
• Gwhere, a disk cataloger
• Prename - batch file renamer
• Pidgin, one of the most popular multi-protocol chat clients
• Gtkam, an application that offers a digital camera interface

Because there was no GTK2 graphical interface for 'xset', Barry Kauler wrote pupX, a frontend that lets you configure the mouse, keyboard and monitor. The theming system for GTK, JWM window manager and desktop background was completely revised. The same Linux kernel that was used in Puppy 3.01 is also being used in Puppy 4.00 (Linux kernel 2.6.21.7). The only thing changed is the Squashfs module that was an upgrade from version 3.2 to 3.3.

PETget, the package manager for Puppy, has now an improved GUI, with package categories and multiple repositories. The type of packages used by Puppy Linux is .pet.

Puppy 4.00 is approximately 88MB in size, and comes with all drivers built-in for scanning and printing, digital camera, audio recording/editing/conversion. Also, it is a complete office environment and has a large collection of utilities.

Download Puppy Linux 4.00 right now from Softpedia.



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