Wary Puppy is a project of the Puppy Linux developer, Barry Kauler, to develop a linux distro which provide support for older hardware. Puppy Linux is already a very light weight distro and runs well on many older systems. However, Puppy Linux is moving to a new software base and it may no longer run so well on the older hardware. To maintain the support for the older hardware Wary Puppy has been introduced.

Wary Puppy uses the older Linux kernel 2.6.31.14 because it provides better support for older hardware. Other components in Wary are a mix of old and new software. X.org which comes in Wary is quite old, Mesa is also fairly old and GTK, gcc etc. are fairly new. Wary also includes the latest releases of applications like SeaMonkey, Abiword, Gnumeric etc. and the latest drivers for printers, scanner etc.

Wary Puppy 5.0 is also an LTS release and will be supported for 2-3 years. In that period it will not have any major upgrades. There will be only bug fixes, incremental improvements and applications update.

As mentioned above, Wary Puppy is not meant for new powerful systems. If you have an old PC, you may want to try running Wary Puppy on it.

You can download Wary Puppy 5.0 from http://puppylinux.com/download/.

You can read more about Wary Puppy here.

[via: Linux Pro Magazine]