I have been a fan of light Linux distros for sometime. A few in particular are Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and some form of Knoppix. These “light” distros work great as virtual machines for testing new software or maybe for just trying to break something that you wouldn’t want to try on your production distro. Plus, I use them to recover data and repair both Windows and Linux machines.

The other day I was looking for a light distro that was graphic oriented. I was looking for something with at least Gimp and Inkscape. I discovered Grafpup. It’s a little more than a 100mb download. Pretty small really. If you are looking for something light-weight and portable then check it out.

Here’s an excerpt from the web page:

Grafpup is a compact distribution containing the Linux kernel and various Open Source and freeware programs. It is especially well suited towards graphic artists and other imaging professionals but has many other tools available as well. Grafpup has been loosely based upon Puppy Linux, which is a creation of Barry Kauler. However, there are a lot of unique features which set it apart both from it’s parent and most other Linux distributions.

Grafpup strives to provide a complete workflow for the digital artist, from beginning to end. As such along with the major graphics applications like Gimp and Inkscape you will also find a variety of support programs and extra features. Color management is enabled for all applications that support it, and there is a basic selection of color profiles included in the standard install. For those doing photographic work there is almost complete support for raw image formats via both dcraw and the ufraw plugin (both Gimp and Cinepaint), as well as the gtkam utility for directly connecting a wide variety of cameras. Scribus and Abiword take care of publishing needs, and Gutenprint provides a wide range of printer drivers.