Today we’re detailing four no-install distributions—Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora—and helping you decide which might work for that spare thumb drive you’ve got lying around, or as just a part of your multi-gig monster stick.

Its been been six months since Puppy Linux 3.01 was released and today Barry Kauler announced Puppy 4.00, aka Dingo. Clocking in at a minimal 87MB download, Puppy 4.00 is a lightweight desktop Linux alternative ideal for low-end machines, or for users who want a little less clutter and more speed from their desktop.

Puppy Linux (and, by extension, Puppeee) was written from scratch with two goals in mind: speed and ease of use. Puppy Linux is, indeed, lightning fast — even when running on low-end machines like the Eee PC.

Booting Linux from an external drive with the applications and settings of your choice has never been easier after this weeks release of Puppy Linux 3.0. Like Damn Small Linux, Puppy is small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive, and like Knoppix , you can boot it from CD.

Most distro reviews focus on installing and using one release of a recent distro. But when people decide to stick with a distro, or abandon it after a longer period of use, the reasons are more to do with the entire distro experience, which includes the distro technology, its package management, the size and reliability of its package repositories, the ease and speed with which bugs are reported and fixed, the quality of the documentation, and the social experience of being part of the distro’s community, as exemplified by its forum and IRC channels. Here I relate my personal experiences with Puppy Linux over the course of approximately one year.

Following the addition of PXE network booting to the ultra-lightweight Puppy Linux distribution, a group of enthusiasts offering Puppy customization and support services has revealed plans for “Minipup,” a project aimed at ultra-low-cost diskless hardware such as sub-$100 PCs.

The Puppy 2.15CE (Community Edition) is the result of collaboration of a team of Puppy enthusiasts. It is built upon version 2.14 but with many enhancements. In particular the guys have worked on an improved user-interface and nice out-of-the box first impression. They have also developed some “SFS” files that add OpenOffice, web and graphics applications — SFS files are “combo packs” of applications that can be installed and uninstalled with a few clicks.

Though worthy Linux distributions from Ubuntu and SUSE run very well, they are also rather large collections (though certainly not as bloated as Windows is!) and this has led to the creation of some smaller incarnations like Damn Small Linux and Feather Linux. The best of these lite Linux versions, though, has got to be Puppy Linux, which, in its 2.14 version, shows that it can run very comfortably with the big hounds.

This new Puppy has major improvements in the underlying architecture as well as the applications, and some new applets created by Puppy enthusiasts. Finally we have embraced the XDG menu system, our new PET package management system is further refined. New applets are Pfind (file finder), and Grafburn (CD/DVD burner).

Attendees will assemble a PC on their lonesome, boot it with an ADOC Puppy Linux live CD, test it for e-learning applications and repeat the set-up for other users.

Lately, it feels like the world is being overrun with otherwise outdated PCs. With landfills overflowing with unwanted computers, it’s great to find that Linux developers have taken it upon themselves to offer a viable solution to simply throwing away older computers. In today’s review, we’ll look closely at Puppy Linux and how well it does from a compatibility point-of-view. Since a number of other reviews have already explained how well Puppy Linux can do with outdated hardware, we figured it might prove valuable to see how well Puppy Linux functions on newer hardware with the needs of today’s notebook user.