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Puppy Linux Family Tree

If you come to this after reading Puppy Linux history, you are forgiven if you think that Puppy Linux as a nice, linear progression from Series 0.x to Series 6.x.

The reality is nothing like that, though … Below is a simplified diagram that shows Puppy Linux distributions, spread over time.

As you can see, everything is relatively calm and ordered until Woof was introduced at Series 4.x. Until that time, Puppy Linux is a traditional, single distribution like others.

By the completion of 4.x series at version 4.3, however, there was an explosion and Puppy Linux become a family of distributions with multiple official Puppies at the same time.

At the end of Puppy Linux 4.3, Puppy Linux was split into multiple distributions (but still sharing the same principles, built using the same set of tools, and provide consistent features between all of them).

Lucid Puppy - a Puppy based on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. The current version is Tahrpup, which is based on Ubuntu Trusty Tahr.

Slacko Puppy - a Slackaware-based Puppy. Originally it was built from Slackware 13.37; current version is uses Slackawre 14.1 as its base.

Racy and Wary - the traditional self-compiled T2-based Puppy.

Quirky - an experimental release of Puppy, which later was forked and made into its own distribution, independent of Puppy Linux.

Puplets

In addition to the “official” puppies, there are also a multitude of unofficial Puppies, built by Puppy enthusiasts. Usually (but not always) made as a remaster, they fill the niche of almost every need. They are usually called as “puplets”.

They are as much a member of Puppy Linux family as the official releases themselves.

Here are some of the more notable puplets, in no particular order:

Macpup - a puplet by runtt21 which takes its design inspiration from Mac OSX™. Its main feature is that it uses the Enlightenment Desktop Environment.

Saluki - this one is by jemima and its standout feature is the XFCE desktop environment and “under the hood” innovations such as an ‘a-drive’ sfs which gets loaded at first boot. jemima is also famous for the puppeee and fluppy puplets - hardware specific puplets targeting the Asus EEE pc.

LightHouse Pup - a comprehensive puplet designed to be extended with specialised sfs packages for KDE, XFCE and other large programs. First developed by tazoc and later taken up by Dry Falls.

NOP (No Office Pup) - produced by gray featuring the removal of office apps and the addition of the XFCE Desktop Environment.

214X - an extension to the famous Puppy 2.1.4 with upgraded glibc, kernel and other updated software. Produced by ttuuxxx who has many more puplets!

Dpup Exprimo - a woof built puppy from the ground up by pemasu. This is a very well liked puplet even to this day. It has binary compatibility with Debian Squeeze. This could well have been an “official” Puppy!

This is by no means an exhaustive list. If running or even making a puplet is in your interest you should browse ally’s collection or vist the Re-masters area of the Puppy Linux Discussion Forum and the puplets area of the Old Puppy Linux Discussion Forum.

Other notable offshots

These are not considered Puppy Linux per se, but they own their existence to Puppy Linux in one way or another.