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Before you even begin your experience with Puppy Linux there are a few things you should be aware of.

• Puppy is not Windows
• Not all your Windows hardware will work in Puppy
• There are no licensing costs associated with Puppy
• Puppy Linux is a true Multitasking, Multiuser, Multiprocessing system
• Puppy is not hard to use
• Puppy is an ongoing development

The easiest way to get Puppy is to either buy a disk from Puppy’s developer, Barry Kauler or download an iso image and create your own live or multi-session CD. You can get instructions from the links below.
Puppy is also available as a keydrive and in hardware - see our shop for details

Buy Puppy∞
Download Puppy∞

Installing Puppy is a simple matter, you can run it off a CD or install it to a hard drive, USB card or a Zip drive. As Puppy runs in a ‘virtual drive’ and is contained in a couple of compressed files it does not really need to be installed the same way that other operating systems usually are. All that is required is for the files to be located where you wish and be bootable by some medium such as a floppy disk a CD or from the Master Boot Record.

Once you have a version of Puppy make sure that your computer is set to boot a CD and start it up with the CD in its drive (don’t be alarmed if Puppy barks at you, this is a welcome!).

When Puppy finishes booting you will be presented with a screen (you may have to choose a display resolution). At the bottom of the screen is a taskbar with the time at one end and a Start button at the other end.

On the desktop you will see a number of icons, (those little pictures), these are shortcuts to various programs that can be accessed by clicking on the icons.
Puppy uses single clicks by default.

The icon in the top right corner is a ‘kill’ program icon, with this you can immediately close any program that you have running on the desktop merely by left button clicking on the icon then clicking on the program you wish to close.

In the top left corner is a ‘Firefox’ or ‘Opera' icon, this is for your web browser.
Below that is an icon for ‘AbiWord’ a word processor that will open and save in the MS Word format, so you can open your MS Word documents and edit them or create documents and save them as MS Word documents.

Next down is an icon for ‘Sylpheed’, a mail retrieval program similar to Outlook express, then an icon for the ‘Rox’ file manager, similar to Windows Explorer. Below that we have ‘Beaver’, a text editor like Wordpad, then ‘rxvt’ a terminal emulator similar to the DOS prompt in Windows.

When I say similar and like, that is exactly what I mean as the utilities in Puppy are very functional.

To start using Puppy click on the Start button in the bottom left corner, this will open the menu. The menu has various sections, in each section is a list of applications or subsections. Starting at the top the sections are:

Control panel
Utilities
Setup

File managers
Graphic processing
Word processing
Information managers
Network
Internet
Multimedia
Games

Find
Help
Run

Shut Down

The subsections are self explanatory so I would advise you to go through the menu, open applications and get a feel for the way they work, this will enable you to start using the programs that you think will suit your needs.

If you have any problems with programs or they won’t close just use the ‘kill’ icon to close them. You won’t see any ‘Blue screens of Death’ in Puppy Linux.

Most of the programs have their own Help files but, if not, you can try the Puppy forum or the original developers of each program, their addresses should be in the Help section of each program under ‘About’.

I will gradually add simple help on each program as I can manage to amass the data.

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