Hiya, Jack.
Mm. Well, now; in all honesty, the very best thing you could do to start with is to spend some time 'lurking' on the Puppy Forums. Many of our new members do, before signing up. There's a wealth of information for newbies in the 'Beginners' sub-forum, including several 'stickies' aimed at helping you to get that first Puppy up-and-running.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php
The current Puppy downloads can be found here:-
http://puppylinux.com/index.html#download
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(I'll be honest with you. Even by Linux standards, Puppy is considered to be an 'oddball' by the rest of the community. If you start to use the 'mainstream' releases, and then come to Puppy later, you have to unlearn stuff, and re-learn it. If, however, you start with Puppy to begin with, it's much easier.....and Puppy was primarily designed to best run with XP-era hardware. Which is why we get so many XP 'refugees'!)
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I digress.
I won't
hesitate to recommend
Tahrpup 6.0.5 for newbies; Phil Broughton, its developer, has gone out of his way to ensure that absolutely everything works OOTB, since he's very much aware of the fact that people's impressions of anything new tend to be coloured by their first encounters with it.
I've been running it since its first release nearly 2 years ago, and it's extremely stable. If you have any 64-bit machines, try
Tahr64; it's just as good.
The best way to try it out is as what's known as a LiveCD; you burn the download (the ISO file) to a blank CD (a CD-R is fine), then you set your machine to boot
from that CD. This allows you to take Pup for a 'test-run', and lets you experiment to make sure Puppy is happy with your hardware.
We recommend folks to use the following small piece of software to 'burn' the ISO file to an optical disc:
BurnCDCC, from Terabyte Unlimited.
https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads-free-software.htm
Download it, unzip it anywhere you like, and simply run the enclosed .exe file. It's virtually foolproof, since it only does
one thing; it 'burns' an ISO file to an optical disc. That's ALL it does. Just make sure you set the burn speed as slow as possible; 2x or 4x at absolute maximum, since the slower you burn to disc, the greater the chance you have of getting it right the first time.
You very rarely need to bother with device drivers of any sort, since they're all contained in the Linux 'kernel' already; it's over 90% nothing
but drivers, in fact! And with each new kernel release, it's steadily getting larger & larger, as support for more & more new devices is added.
Once you have Puppy running, as long as you're happy with it, you can then install it permanently to a USB flashdrive. This might sound a peculiar way to run an OS, but Puppy was designed to work this way right from its inception, way back in 2003. And that way, you can still run XP alongside it.....and the two won't interfere with each other.
Even on elderly hardware, Puppy runs pretty fast, since it loads entirely into, and runs from, the fastest component of any machine.....its RAM. And there's a wealth of available software, too; either from the Puppy Package Manager, or through the Forum itself, via the 'Additional Software' sub-forum, since many of our members (including myself) like to compile & build their own software packages, and if they work as they should, we then share them with the community.
However, I seem to recall that you already found the Puppy Forum a while back; didn't I put you onto it several months ago?
Mike.