Firstly, this is not really the Wary version of Puppy 5.3; it's version 5.3 of Puppy Wary! This is a much better offering than Puppy Slacko 5.3. It replaces the series 4 Puppy and will be supported for at least 3 years. Wary is intended for older hardware: thus it supports dial-up modems but not recent video cards. Racy is for more recent hardware.

Puppy can be run from RAM disk, either copied from the CD or from files placed on a Windows partition (frugal install); configuration can then be stored on USB memory or the hard disk. Running in RAM needs 512MB. Puppy can also be installed conventionally. This needed 140MB to run Seamonkey, while Bodhi, AntiX, and Vector Light can all browse in less than 128MB.

Installation is not beginner-friendly, but it works. Grub installation is done afterwards with a separate program. The software provided includes Seamonkey, Abiword, Gnumeric, Inklite, Mtpaint, and Homebank. The repository is small but adequate. I tested the package installer with Thunar and Icewm, and all went well. Media codecs were installed and all formats played well, including a commercial DVD. Configuration tools have improved. There's even one to switch between internal and external sound devices, a major strugle in Ubuntu. Internationalisation and keyboard configuration have also improved.

The first problem was that programs come without their help files, which don't seem to be available in the repository. The help icon gives you the option of using on-line help, which worked for Abiword, but not for Inklite.

The second involved setting keyboard shortcuts. A tool is now included, but you need to know what to enter and there's no help. When I tried setting Super+h as a shortcut, all that happened was that I lost ‘h’. Deleting the shortcut didn't restore the key, which remained dead even after rebooting!

Although I've rated this 7/10, I can't really recommend it. If you have 128MB, Puppy is too big. If you have 256MB, there are friendlier GUIs than JWM. And it would be nice to have some help files.