On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 18:19 +0000, Mark Reid wrote:
I've tried both and generally found DSL to be meaner and leaner then Puppy. Puppy does have a good range of software in its live CD from what I can remember but DSL beat it on its ability to recognise hardware and boot into much more minimalist environments (it will run on really old machines). I keep a copy of the credit card version because it's excellent for exploring and diagnosing machines that aren't working properly but will still boot a small system form CD.
I keep a copy of DSL on a usb stick set up to boot in a standalone copy of qemu. This has configuration for the office VPN plus my mail settings and some keys to access various systems etc. One click of a batch file for windows or a shell script for linux systems has a virtual machine running without me having to mess about reconfiguring a clients machine for my needs, or working out how to perform the magic to get USB boot working on some machines. Less useful for fixing broken machines but a handy way of having a familiar desktop with me for use on working ones.
For CD boot of broken systems I still tend to veer towards knoppix