Linux Distro Called 'Puppy'?

By Alexander Wolfe, TechWeb News

“A retired university lecturer in Australia has come up with the latest twist on Linux , fielding a distribution of the operating system that takes little memory and can boot directly off of a USB thumb drive.

Dubbed Puppy Linux, the OS is one of dozens of custom and guerilla variants on Linux circulating throughout the broader software community. (Many are tracked on the Distrowatch open-source Web site.) But Puppy appears to be catching on, attracting recent attention on Slashdot in the wake of the release in May of Puppy Linux version 1.0.2.

‘I think one of the key advantages of Puppy is the simplicity,’ said Barry Kauler, the developer of Puppy Linux, in an e-mail interview. ‘When other distributions start up, you see all these servers loading, but in Puppy it's really basic and bootup is remarkably fast. However, I still managed to stick to the requirement of it all loading into RAM and freeing up the CD drive, on a reference 128MB PC.’

That small-is-beautiful theme is Puppy's raison d'etre, according to Kauler. ‘If I were pressed to list why I think people use Puppy, it would be [that it's] very simple under-the-hood, very easy to use, very fast, highly portable, and easy to install.’ ”

http://www.crn.com/nl/crnupdate/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=163702896

Office Goes XML

From: Between the Lines

“The important revelation, which was expected, is that some Office 12 applications (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) will use Office Open XML as the default file format. Note: Excel and Word already have XML support and related schemas for saving documents with full fidelity as XML files. The formats are industry standard XML 1.0 and the schemas are available on a royalty-free basis. As a result, developers can query what's in a file and extract specific data or write their own compatible applications to view and manipulate the files. User can open the .XML files in any application that can read XML. "Our value is not tied to file format, but to the user experience and quality of the software." Capossela said. Now that's a refreshing point of view, given how in the past Microsoft has often made it difficult for others to parse the file formats.

What's new for Microsoft is compacting the often overweight XML text files using industry standard Zip compression technology to compress and decompress the data within a document–including comments, charts and document metadata–that is segmented and stored in different components. However, OLE objects and images are still stored as binaries.

Using Zip gets around the thorny issue of creating a binary XML to deal with file bloat.…

A preview of Office 12 (not an initial beta, which isn't due until the fall) will be available at www.microsoft.com/office/preview on Monday, June 6. I asked about XML file formats for Macintosh Office, but Capossela wasn' sure–Mac Office is done by a different business group at Microsoft. Nor is a Linux version of Office on the drawing board. We'll also have to wait to hear about other features that will make it into Office 12. The dribbling continues…”

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=1459&tag=nl.e539