Macpup Opera adds a little sizzle to Puppy's minimalist core

When it comes to lightweight Linux distros, there are two key names people usually mention: Damn Small and Puppy. They're both great, but if you'd prefer a bit more polish on your desktop, the Macpup Opera remix might be just what you're looking for.

If you're an Opera fan and a Linux experimenter, this distro is a double win for you. As you'd guess from the full name, Opera (9.64) is baked in. SeaMonkey is also included, and other browsers are just a repository away. MacPup bundles additional programs for just about every common task, including apps like Transmission, Gnumeric, AbiWord, Gxine, and Xfburn.

Enlightenment e17 handles window management duties, so you can skin your desktop with any of the themes available at Get-E.org to customize your experience.

Since it's Puppy-based, you can roll-your-own distro using Remaster once you have things configured the way you want and burn your creation to a CD or write it to a USB flash drive.

Macpup runs beautifully on minimal hardware and it's an excellent distribution for older machines. Even in a VirtualBox VM running 384Mb memory, performance was solid - especially after installing to the virtual hard drive.

Tags: enlightenment, livecd, opensource, puppy-linux