Blue Pup

Blue Pup is an open source operating system based on the minimal Puppy Linux distribution and heavily inspired by the Metro interface used in the commercial Microsoft Windows 8 OS. It has been designed with a single goal in mind, to make the transition of Windows users to Linux as hassle-free as possible.

Distributed as an IMG file suitable for USB sticks

The distribution can be downloaded from Softoware as a single IMG file archived with the performant XZ compression algorithm. Once extracted, the image must be written to a USB flash drive of 8GB or higher capacity in order to boot it from the BIOS of a PC.

Metro interface on Linux

No one thought that this would be possible nor did they think that this would occur, Metro user interface for Linux distributions. Well, Blue Pup is here to prove you wrong, as it uses a Metro-like interface on top of a lightweight JWM (Joe's Window Manager) graphical desktop environment.

The bootable medium has been designed to drop the user to the Metro interface by default. To access the standard desktop environment, one must press the ALT+F4 key combination. Among the preinstalled applications, we can mention the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, Chromium web browser, Tickr RSS reader, and Skype VoIP client.

In addition, the distirbution comes with Puppy Linux-specific utilities, such as the PupControl panel, PupSnap screen capture utility, PupClockset manager, wmctrl to control a NetWM/EWMH compatible X Window Manager, as well as extra codecs for the Chromium web browser and the Adobe Flash Player.

Bottom line

We have no idea if Blue Pup is here to stay, but it definitely proved that innovation still exists in the GNU/Linux ecosystem. It is the perfect operating system to try if you want to migrate from a Windows 8 system to Linux.

What is new in this release:

• Image size reduced to 293 MB.
• Latest versions of Flash, Thunderbird and Chrome extensions.
• New default wallpaper & custom Conky display.
• New toggle switch on JWM Desktop menu to turn Conky display on and off.
• Expanded README notes with original launcher on Metro tile and additional bookmark in browser.
• For V6 there now remains only one optional dotpet - BlueScreenSaver.pet. All other service packs and previously optional pets having been incorporated.
• On the new desktop the "Moon" appears. It seemed to fit in with the new wallpaper but is also an additional icon to launch the Metro interface. In a similar fashion to the WWW panel icon it will not launch it full screen.
• To launch Metro full screen, press the left hand Windows key or kiss the left hand side of your screen with your mouse pointer if you have "Hot Screen Sides" enabled.
• A change from Chromium to Chrome Stable 38.0.2125.101 proved problematic. I will await the next stable version but have upgraded libnss3 to 3.17.1 in anticipation.