I am  building a little music rig based on the Three Headed Dog Linux Puppy.

Nothing has been taken out of the Three Headed Dog Puppy because it just seems so solid and I didn't want to break it!

So if you like Luci Puppy you should like this version, and upgrades will work with this version. Tested ok.

I chose this distro because it has good support for sound cards both old and new and Retrovol makes selecting multiple soundcards easy now.

Don't have to reboot, just restart the X Server.

It has ASIO thru Jack and I am achieving 5ms no sweat, unless I really push it, which of course I am doing...

The distro contains a choice selection of vsti drums and synths, like the excellent Synth 1, and Jesolola xs1 Soundfont Synth.

Marvin Vst Retromine, TR808, 909 types and even a Simmons type drum module,  Plugsound free version, which has a really nice Spanish guitar, a jazz drum kit.

a passable piano and some other stuff like moogy bass. 

Wavosaur is a great little audio recorder/editor, and I have setup the lame encoder so one can save as mp3 if needed.

It also has a vst rack, which means you can preview and apply all sorts of plugins to your audio.

I also put the ancient but nice  Reaper 0.999 version in to try out. It is a bit buggy, it seems that when it starts, you need to go to audio devices, and hit apply for your soundcard.

Then it seems to run well, until you maybe choose another plugin, and then you have to go back and hit apply again in audio device. MIDI seems pretty solid.

Also, the excellent Fretted Synth Guitar Amps, so you can start laying down a bit of real guitar, or you could shove a vocal through the amps and see what happens.. 

This is running on Podium Free version, which I am testing to see if it crashes yet! It is very fussy with plugins.

Podium so far seems to be rock solid, and latencies achievable are on a par with all the other multitrackers out there. It isn't restricted, like no saving or annoying beeps.

Check out Zynewave Podium for more info, including the mothership version for the big boys, and see if it suits you!

And Reaper has moved on in leaps and bounds, so it might be worth checking that out if you need the latest and greatest.

Also is a prog called Partition Saving. I have used it quite a lot in the past and very rarely has it refused to save and restore a partition,

(think it was an error on my part once, all that bad crc stuff).

I tried to get this Puppy to be up and running if a bit of inspiration strikes.

So hopefully when it gets to the desktop all you should need to do is start ASIO Control (the Jack Server) load an app and be ready to go.

Of course you will need to do your resolution and desktop preferences first time, I did think about putting Xorg High in, but thought better of it because it might cause some problems with various computers and graphics chips.

Some pics below.