Welcome, woof, woof!

As this is the very first time that you have booted (started) Puppy, he (yes, Puppy has gender) is running totally in RAM!
RAM space The taskbar shows how much space is available for file storage. If showing a red background, space is critical, so do not run big apps like SeaMonkey -- instead, shutdown Puppy and you will be asked to create a permanent storage file, that will give you more space.
Internet connection Click on the 'connect' icon at lower-left of the screen (one click only -- do not double-click!). If you have a external serial analog modem, it will have been auto-detected, ditto the kernel driver for your network card should have been automatically detected and loaded. The exception is wireless, which is currently a work-in-progress.
'connect' icon, see desktop

I need help! Lots of local help is available -- select 'Help' in the menu (see left side of taskbar). The local Help page also has the Release Notes for this version of Puppy -- well worth checking out!
When you get online, the web browser home page has many more links.



Saving a session At first shutdown, you are asked where you want to save your personal files/data/settings to, and this can be any FAT (as used for MSDOS or Windows 9x) partition, NTFS (as used by Windows XP) partition or Linux partition in the hard drive, or any plugin drive (USB Flash pen drive for example).*


* Note, a 'partition' is known by a drive letter in dos/windows, such as C:, D:, but Linux uses a more rigorous naming scheme, such as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2. If you are unfamiliar with these different types of partitions (and the Linux naming), don't worry, as Puppy will automatically detect and offer you a choice of suitable partitions in which to save the session. Puppy will only create a single file in the partition and this will not affect your current installation of Windows (but of course we have to make a full disclaimer of any responsibility if something does go wrong!) and next time you boot Puppy from CD the save-file will get automatically read -- so, there is really no need to install Puppy onto the hard drive, and you can just keep booting Puppy from CD indefinitely.

Regards,
the Puppy Team