Welcome to Puppy version PUPPYVERSION, released PUPPYDATE

PLEASE READ: Release Notes for Puppy PUPPYVERSION

Hi, I am Barry Kauler, the original developer of the Puppy Operating System, and you can find a complete introduction to Puppy on the web at: http://www.puppylinux.com/ and http://www.puppylinux.org/

You are going to be amazed at the quantity and quality of applications in such a tiny Linux 'distro', as well as blown away by the speed and stunned by the ease-of-use.

My aim is for Puppy to become a no-brainer to use (ie, no need to read the manual!). Just turn on the PC, and off you go... we're not there yet, as some configuration files may have to be edited, plus various apps have to be "tweaked". Maybe some of your PC hardware doesn't work -- in that case, first browse through the online documentation, then search the Puppy Discussion Forum -- as a last resort, post a question.

I would like to very briefly acknowledge all the guys whose programs I have used in Puppy. Truly, I am standing on the shoulders of many others to reach this new pinnacle that is the achievement of Puppy Linux. I have acknowledged people throughout the documentation and on the web, and my profuse gratitude goes out to all you guys who code just because you love doing it. I would also like to send out a special thank-you for the help received from the guys on the Puppy Discussion Forum.

In fact, if you look at the release notes linked-to above, what is immediately apparent is that Puppy is now a team effort, a change that has been incrementally increasing so over the last couple of years. Any acknowledgement now needs to go to our entire "Puppy Team" rather than just me.

## Puppy help

All Puppy's local documentation is in HTML or plain text format and located in /usr/share/doc. This page is the master index.

### Puppy-specific help

- HOWTO get onto the Internet (dial-up your ISP)
- HOWTO write programs for Puppy
- HOWTO multimedia (work with graphics, sound, video)
- HOWTO regular expressions (what they are, how to use)
- HOWTO internationalize scripts in Puppy (non-English users and developers)

Note that although Puppy has Busybox, which is a very small toolkit of utility applications, in some cases they do not have the required functionality and are replaced by the full versions. These replacements include: modprobe, cat, cp, gzip, gunzip, losetup, ls, mkdir, mv, rm, sed, sort, tar, wget, date, find, grep, fgrep and egrep.

Note that Puppy applications are open source and under various GPL licences, however there are a few exceptions.

The Librepup logo by Koz Ross is provided under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.