Cloudy Skies Live is an astronomy software CD featuring more than 2 dozen programs integrated with Puppy 3.01 Linux core.
Compiz-Fusion wizard by Tombh is incorporated to provide accelerated 3D graphics for video cards such as nVidia (from GeForce2 onwards), ATI (from Radeon 7000 onwards), Intel (from i810 onwards), and possibly newer SIS cards (but untested so far). Celestia, coords, OpenUniverse, Planets3d, Skydome, and Stellarium require the use of these drivers for best performance. A 3D graphics card is not necessary to run these six programs, but the frame rates could be inadequate. Wine has been included to run three of the Windows applications included in the software (Iris, Registax, and Jupiter2).
If you reside in the United States, you might find the spreadsheet file "Zipcode 2 longitude" helpful because it contains over 33,000 zip codes, providing the latitude and longitude for each in both decimal degrees and degree, minutes, and seconds. The installed star catalogs for the seven planetarium programs include hundreds of thousands of stars. Furthermore, over 9,800 deep sky images (pictures) are integrated into the "Sky Charts" planetarium program. There is more to explore on Cloudy Skies Live, and an internet connection is not needed to use this software.
Puppy Linux is an evolutionary operating system based on GNU Linux. What distinguishes Puppy is that it is incredibly small yet fully functional. Puppy Linux can boot into a 64MB ramdisk, and that's it, the whole caboodle runs in RAM. All applications start up instantly and respond to user input instantly because Puppy in its entirety loads into RAM, unlike live CD distributions that must continuously extract content from the CD.
Puppy Linux has the ability to boot from a flash card or any USB memory device (flash-Puppy), CD-ROM (live-Puppy), Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk (zippy-Puppy), floppy disks (floppy-Puppy), and internal hard drives (hard-Puppy), requiring only 50-60M of storage media. Once booted, everything uncompresses into a RAM area known as a "ramdisk." The live-CD can be booted on systems with only 32M RAM, but the speed and quality will improve as the RAM increases. It is recommended to use a PC with 128M RAM or more. Puppy will automatically use a swap partition if one exists during boot. If there is not enough RAM available, Puppy can copy excess data to a swap partition if it exists, reducing write states on Flash memory during a session and extending lifespan. A swap partition is recommended for PCs with less than 64M RAM or only 32M RAM to run most big GUI applications.
Version 1.01: N/A