Puppy becomes Smarter

You may have read the review of Puppy.
For those that didn't, Puppy is a very small linux distro.
Puppy comes in various formats as well.
There is the original version which is a small CD version that can be run as a live disk.
You can boot Puppy from a usb stick or simply install it on  your hard drive.
But , what if, you could use Puppy without  even rebooting a computer?
Yup, boot it straight from your works networked computer without using the network (except to reach the internet), or interfering with their network and using your own settings.
Step forward the emulated Puppy.
This version is maintained by Erik Veenstra.

The site can be found here

Basically Puppy is run from within an emulator, namely Qemu
Erik's site details how to get this version of Puppy and all the info you require to run it.
The Qemu site gives all the information on the emulator.
You can download Qemu-Puppy  by clicking the link and downloading from there.
Once you install it, you should have something like this on your usb stick. I put it in a folder called pup as you can see.

Starting Puppy from within linux is easy, simply pull up a console, jump to the directory I put puppy into and type ./puppy.sh
The result is wonderful. Puppy starts and  asks for settings exactly the same as if you booted from a live CD.

As you can see from the picture, I was playing music, using Azureus, running my email and various other bits 'n' bobs.
Clicking inside the window makes the mouse pointer active, and to escape back onto the host operating system, simply hit Ctrl +  Alt.
The emulated puppy I downloaded came up with  a panic on boot, which is a known bug.  Erik's site  has a patch for this (which means editing the  .sh file).  The more observant may have noticed that my directory has  puppy.sh and puppy2.sh.  These are the before and after versions of the edit.
Puppy has loads of applications ready to go and while in puppy will work exceedingly well. I should point out that when you exit puppy, all changes will write back to the usb stick, saving any changes you have made.
So, it appears to run on linux pretty well, albeit a lot slower than if you launched it natively.

Want more applications?

Puppy already has loads of applications built on to it. The usual stuff like media players, video players, DVD players, office applications, editors etc etc.
In the normal puppy, you simply launch pupget to download more ready made packages.
It is no different in the qemu version.

Puppy used my existing connection (after I told it to use it) and the results can be seen.

So, Qemu-Puppy is a success running under linux. How about Windows?

Yup, works there as well. Here we can see puppy booting.

Amazing, looks exactly the same as it did under linux.
Works exactly the same way as well.
I tried it on the networked computer at work.
Same result.
Puppy just worked.
How to start it in Windows?
Navigate to where you have stored Puppy and double click on the Puppy icon.
Simple, and effective.
If you want this, and I assume that most folk will be intrigued with it, use the links in this article.
Puppy is an ideal way to try out linux and makes it even easier. Now you don't even have to reboot!
Shutting it down is the same as usual.

Go on, you know you want to :-)