Announcement and release notes for Puppy Linux 4.00

Finally it has happened! The last 'official' release of Puppy was version 3.01, released October 15, 2007. Version 4.00 is happening 6 months later, which is an incredibly long time considering the previous frenetic schedule of releases. Anyway, here it is: the live-CD file is 'puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso' and is just 87.1MB. Download from http://puppylinux.com/download/.

That 6 months has not been idle! Here is a summary of milestones along the way, with links to my daily Developer News pages:
Wow, this Puppy has all drivers built-in for scanning, digital camera, printing (Gutenprint), audio recording/editing/conversion, making it a complete multimedia environment ...yet is only 87.1MB!!! Of course this is in addition to being a complete office environment, in addition to having a huge collection of useful utilities, in addition to anything else you can think of...

Acknowledgement to application authors
Some of our Puppy-enthusiasts are very much into developing software. I have listed new packages above, but there are also pre-existing packages that have been improved. Many of these new and improved packages are created 'in house' by our own guys and I would like to send out a general acknowledgement. You will know who they are if you lurk on the forum, but I would particularly like to mention 'zigbert' who has been very prolific and and a great boon to the Puppy community.

Alternative 4.00 live-CD with 2.6.25 kernel
The 'standard' build of Puppy 4.00 is file 'puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso, which is 87.1MB -- compare that with Puppy 3.01 'standard' (with much less functionality) which is 98.6MB!
I have also built 'puppy-4.00-k2.6.25-seamonkey.iso', using the latest Linux kernel. This may not be quite as mature for wireless network connectivity though. Choose this one if you want support for a dual-core CPU (but the 'standard' build with mono-core 2.6.21.7 kernel works on dual-core systems). Also, strangely enough, we have more success booting older PCs with the 2.6.23 and later kernels, so try this one if Puppy fails to boot.
The 2.6.25 kernel is configured with the unified /dev/sd* and /dev/sr* drive naming, which may cause some difficulty if you need to configure GRUB.

Other Puppy releases since 3.01
The Puppy community has not been idle either since the release of 3.01. There have been many Puppy-derivatives released. I can't list them all here, and you need to go to the the Community News page for announcements. A couple that I made note of in my Developer News are 2.14R, which is version 2.14 brought up-to-date with the latest features of Puppy -- this older Puppy is good for some older PCs that cannot handle later versions of the Linux kernel read more read more. I also mentioned Muppy Linux, which is a fork of Puppy, based on version 3.01 read more. There has also been a start at the next in the Puppy3 series (binary compatibility with Slackware 12), version 3.02alpha read more -- see also forum announcements read more read more.

T2 build system for Dingo
The complete package of T2 and source packages that I used to create the original Puppy Dingo 4.00alpha1 is available for download. After getting a working Puppy, I then used it to compile further packages, so you need to take this T2 build as the boot-strap first step. Please be warned, this is not a way to create Puppy from source! read more.

Puppy Unleashed
This is the recommended way of building your own Puppy. There have been numerous improvements. read more. Get it via the download page.

Best regards,
Barry Kauler
www.puppylinux.com