When it comes to lightweight Linux distros, there are two key names people usually mention: Damn Small and Puppy. They're both great, but if you'd prefer a bit more polish on your desktop, the Macpup Opera remix might be just what you're looking for.

If you're an Opera fan and a Linux experimenter, this distro is a double win for you. As you'd guess from the full name, Opera (9.64) is baked in. SeaMonkey is also included, and other browsers are just a repository away. MacPup bundles additional programs for just about every common task, including apps like Transmission, Gnumeric, AbiWord, Gxine, and Xfburn.

Enlightenment e17 handles window management duties, so you can skin your desktop with any of the themes available at Get-E.org to customize your experience.

Since it's Puppy-based, you can roll-your-own distro using Remaster once you have things configured the way you want and burn your creation to a CD or write it to a USB flash drive.

Macpup runs beautifully on minimal hardware and it's an excellent distribution for older machines. Even in a VirtualBox VM running 384Mb memory, performance was solid - especially after installing to the virtual hard drive.

Puppy Linux is one of the most popular thumb drive Linux distributions. What that means is the entire operating system weighs in at less than 100MB, and can be run on any computer just by plugging in a USB flash drive. But unlike some thumb drive distros, Puppy Linux provides such a robust desktop experience that you could seriously make a case for running Puppy as your primary operating system, at least on older machines with slow processors and small hard drives.

Puppy Linux 4.0 Dingo is the latest version of Puppy, and it packs all the usual goodies like the SeaMonkey internet suite (which is a Mozilla product with a Firefox-like web browser), AbiWord word processor, and Gnumeric spreadsheet application. But there are also a bunch of improvements over Puppy 3, including:

• Support for scanners and digital cameras
• Audio recording, editing, and conversion software
• New GTK2 applications including ePDFView, Pschedule, Pcdripper, Pburn, and Pnethood
• Automatic selection of native screen resolutions for LCD monitors
• A new theme and background

Puppy 4.0 uses the same 2.6.21.7 kernel as Puppy 3, which was released 6 months ago. But there's an optional version of Puppy 4.0 that uses the 2.6.25 kernel for bleeding edge types. Some Puppy features have been reported not to work as well with the newer kernel.

[via eeextra]

We know you've had a busy week, John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani. But now that you both have so much more free time on your hands, we thought you might want to spend some time catching up on the news you might have missed this week.

Microsoft seeks to acquire Yahoo!

If you've been living under a rock for the last 24 hours, you might not know this yet, but Microsoft has put in an offer to acquire Yahoo!. It's all part of the company's grand scheme to take over the world... before Google does. Microsoft has offered $44.6 billion buyout, and while it's not exactly a done deal yet, there's a pretty decent chance Yahoo! will accept the offer. And we've been meaning to ask, how's the insulation on a rock? Does it keep you warm in the winter?

Ask DLS: Recovering photos from a corrupted flash card

It's happened to all of us. You snap some wonderful vacation photos, or record your child's first steps on your digital camera, only to realize that your flash card is corrupted and you're computer can't make heads or tails of it. Before you reformat the card, take a moment to check out our list of applications for recovering photos from a bad card. All hope might not be lost. Make sure to read the comments too, because many of our readers chimed in with their favorite applications for recovering photo and other data.

Puppy Linux 3.0 was released this week, and like earlier versions of Puppy Linux, it's a tiny distro, weighing in at under 100MB. But it's packed with features, making it an excellent distribution for older computers with small hard drives and slow processors. You can also run Puppy Linux from a LiveCD or throw it on a flash drive and run it from any computer that will boot from a USB drive.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that OpenOffice alone is larger than 100MB, so what kind of applications does Puppy Linux 3.0 include?

• AbiWord for word processing
• Gnumeric for spreadsheets
• SeaMonkey for web browsing
• Pidgin for instant messaging
• XFinans financial management

Of course, if you want to install OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, or other programs on top of Puppy Linux you're free to do so. But you might want to take it easy, seeing as the more apps you add the more memory you'll use, which kind of defeats the purpose of having such a lightweight operating system.

It looks like some Puppy websites aren't responding at the moment, so here are a few alternate download links.