Damn Small Linux Not So Small 222
An anonymous reader writes "According to DistroWatch, Damn Small Linux (DSL) is currently the most popular microLinux distribution. Linux.com (Also owned by VA) takes a look at why this might be the case, and how you can best take advantage of it. From the article: 'What began as a toy project to stuff the maximum software inside a 50MB ISO file has matured into a refined community project known for its speed and versatility. DSL includes the ultra-lightweight FluxBox window manager, two Web browsers, Slypheed email client and news reader, xpdf PDF viewer, XMMS with MPEG media file support for playing audio and video, BashBurn CD burner, XPaint image editing, VNCViewer and rdesktop to control Windows and Linux desktops remotely, and more. If they could do all this in 50 megs, imagine what they could do in more space. Last month the DSL developers released DSL-Not, a.k.a. DSL-N 0.1 RC1. It's 83.5MB of DSL coated with GTK sugar. Yummy!'"
Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite the increasing size, DSL is still an awesome tool. It manages to pack almost as much coolness as Knoppix (less cohesive, 'cause it's not all KDE, but most of the functionality is still there in discrete applications) in a much smaller size that is more convenient to download when you need a quick but useful bootable Linux disc.
Kudos to the developers, keep up the good work!
PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:2)
What hardware, specifically?
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:5, Informative)
I then switched to Knoppix 3.4, using the 2.4 kernel to support older hardware as mentioned.
Here is my Getting Started Guide [geocities.com], also have a technical blog here. [blogspot.com]
There are some screenshots available there.
One post that I need to draw your attention to is the one about "testcd" [blogspot.com] for Knoppix remasters. I did run into problems with some versions of DSL using isolinux, in that they would not boot on many of my older computers, due perhaps to the "testcd" problem. It is extremely important that any knoppix remaster pass that test, or there will be complaints concerning no-booting on boxes that used to run the distro flawlessly in an earlier syslinux version.
For that reason, DSL often offers syslinux versions alongside isolinux versions.
I don't feel that I have to, since I pass "testcd" 100%, and mine boots on all my older boxes, in addition to the newer P4 ones.
One clue that I did take from DSL is to include lots of custom-made applications, found nowhere else. That makes a remaster different, and not just a re-arrangement of stock applications.
I do have a bright yellow boot: command line against a black background, making it easy to enter long cheatcodes when trying out a new build. So many knoppix builds have a pale gray boot: command line with black background, very hard to see what you are doing!
Also, see the main screenshots page link in my signature, below.
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:4, Informative)
Oh and it can be installed to hard disk to give a new life to old computer.
http://www.puppyos.com/ [puppyos.com]
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Years ago, I had a P2 350 with 64 meg of RAM and Windows 98. (not Special Edition. If it has a 'boot slower' feature, I'd be interested to hear about it...) That didn't take 10 minutes to boot. Maybe 2, but nowhere near 10. If it did, I would have switched to NT far earlier than I did.
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:PuppyLinux with 2.6? (Score:4, Informative)
1. Kernel 2.6.11 and modules
2. Mozilla Suite 1.7.12, browser,mail,irc,etc.
3. Mplayer 3.3.5 audio and video
4. Leafpad 0.7.9 editor/notepad
5. Abiword 2.2.7 wordprocessor
6. Gnumeric 1.4.3 spreadsheet
7. gTFP 2.0.18 ftp client
8. gaim 0.77 IM client
9. Xpdf 3.0.0 pdf viewer
10.Emelfm 0.9.2 file manager
11.Xpaint 2.7.6 paint program
12.Cups 1.1.14 printing
13.unionfs supported as an optional boot parameter
14.MyDSL system of extensions
15.Frugal Installs
16.USB Pendrive Install
To me that makes DSL very 2003, it's playing catch up in my books.
Update Your Books.
Begun, (Score:3, Funny)
(bloat war/bloatware? get it? get it?! ah I am teh funny
Re:Begun, (Score:5, Funny)
No Firefox ? (Score:2, Funny)
just give me Firefox, a net connection and leave the rest to extensions
Re:No Firefox ? (Score:4, Informative)
And though it I had the introduction to the excellent Scheme In A Grid [siag.nu]
DSL recently had a "Donate a Dollar" fundraising drive. I don't know how much money they made but I gave them a $. Who says you can't make monet from free software !
Re:No Firefox ? (Score:2)
Re:No Firefox ? (Score:5, Funny)
Well.. I suppose the GIMP's good enough these days to create a monet, but you'd stil be far better off springing for Photoshop.
Re:No Firefox ? (Score:5, Funny)
But then it wouldn't be Damn Small, now would it?
Re:No Firefox ? (Score:2)
Sylpheed is an awesome email client (Score:5, Informative)
Sylpheed is pretty nice. Back when I used GNOME, I tried it [mooo.com] as my email client. Really nice, great performance on large folders. (Now I use mutt.)
Not that big Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
The OP seems to have missed the whole point of DSL. There are plenty of other choices of distro if you take away the size limit.
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what they meant was, "imagine what it would be like to have a distro that wasn't full of bloat."
You may now begin telling us how #insert_your_favourite_distro_here# is bloat free. :-)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one of the reasons why all modern OSes are so large, they all strive to attract as wide a userbase as possible. They want to appeal to EVERYONE.
That and (Score:5, Insightful)
Programs are much larger these days then they used to be but that's not a bad thing. EVen if it is because of something like moving to a managed language that needs runtimes and generates larger code, it's not bad if it makes it easier to maintain. You can still step back to more compact, less feature rich designs when needed as DSL demonstrates.
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:2)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:2)
As examples of this, you could have quoted Microsoft Office, which fits on two floppies, or Java, which is only a 100K download ...
oh, wait...
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:5, Funny)
Plus, with the extra 150 megs, they could ship EMACS.
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but at least OO.o has a text editor!
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:2)
The first time I did it, I did shatter the card.
After that, I kept them in the billfold area between a couple of other cards and never had any trouble.
Re:Not that big Linux (Score:3, Funny)
I can quit any time I want to. *clutches DSL business card CD and looks around nervously*
I use it all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
I would guess at two reasons for the numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Second I have found many non Linux users who think DSL sounds like a good way to start because they're so sick of bloat. Could be that a lot of them download it just to see what it's like. This second reason is probably somewhat unfortunate since DSL can be a bit frustrating for someone unfamiliar with FOSS distros.
I used to have some machines using DSL, but I found that Knoppix with fluxbox just made it so much simpler.
Re:I would guess at two reasons for the numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I would guess at two reasons for the numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I would guess at two reasons for the numbers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I would guess at two reasons for the numbers (Score:3, Insightful)
Thumbdrive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thumbdrive (Score:2)
I tried Slackware on my thumbdrive, but I could never get it to boot, the tutorial I used did cover replacing the boot sector, but the replacement boot sector could never find the operating system.
I then caved in and tried BartPE. I had similar problems with that, but I finally got it to work using a third-party tool.
Now I can boot from a thumb drive, which is pretty neat.
This brings up my main reason I don't use Linux though... it's near impossible to install on this computer without wiping my hard
Re:Thumbdrive (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thumbdrive (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, when booting from any device is impossible, and you just gotta have your Linux, this makes a great option.
I've never tried the combo of QEMU and DSL, but I just did, and I'm making this post from within Linux running on top of WinXP. In fact, I'd never used QEMU before. It's the itch I didn't know I wanted to scratch until I tried it.
It's a bit slow, obviously, but it definately gets the job done and done well. I can't count the number of times I wanted to use a Linux app or CLI while in Windows and didn't want to have to reboot.
The FOSS community continues to amaze me at least once every month.
Good, but not perfect... Knoppix is a pain (Score:5, Interesting)
DSL is a nice demo, but the Knoppix structure makes it a real pain to customize.* Say you want a different version of Perl or Xorg, or want to modify the bootloader and kernel to display a full screen banner image/logo, it's a whole heck of a lot of work to rip out the original components and replace them with your own. Rolling your own distro from scratch only requires a bit more work, and you have better control and a better understanding of what's going on.
* If any DSL experts have advice on how to make these customizations easier, I might give it a try again.
Re:Good, but not perfect... Knoppix is a pain (Score:5, Informative)
The problem isn't the tool. The problem is you trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Re:Good, but not perfect... Knoppix is a pain (Score:2)
DSL and DSL-N (Score:5, Informative)
It's also worth mentioning that the original DSL uses a lightweight GUI toolkit called FLTK [fltk.org] and Lua for its tools, interesting!
It's popular because.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's popular because.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It's popular because.. (Score:2)
Re:It's popular because.. (Score:2)
why I love linux (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if the DSL project can be forked to create a "Damn small server" project, so anyone can set it up on an old machine, enable some services, hide it in a corner, and use SSH/VNC to administer it.
Smoothwall. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have a laptop, you have a computer you want to use for more than a server. DSL is just the right thing if you have low RAM. If you have 128 or more MB of RAM, just run Mepis or Debian Sarge.
I wonder if the DSL project can be forked to create a "Damn small server" project, so anyone can set it up on an old machine, enable some services, hide it in a corner, and use SSH/VNC to administer it.
Have you looked at Smoothwall yet?
Hope they keep the original intent and size (Score:2, Interesting)
missing the point? (Score:5, Funny)
stop calling it Damn Small Linux for one.
How the times change (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, how they change (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How the times change (Score:4, Funny)
+1: Respected elder
-1: Up hill both ways...
Re:How the times change (Score:2)
Different *DSL sizes make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Size/ability tradeoff was always available (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I did nothing more than
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=DSL_OO.image
and stuck in other 256MB USB keys and did:
dd if=DSL_OO.image of=/dev/sda1
and was able to hand out $25 "thank you" tokens to speakers at our local Unix User Group (www.cuug.ab.ca) that consisted of a bootable USB Linux with full OpenOffice functionality. Ran fine on 256MB PCs with all software loaded into RAM - OO starts faster on these old machines than much faster ones that have to pull OO off the HD.
In short, you could ALWAYS pump up DSL with a good selection of softare they've made available in packages. It only starts off at 50MB.
Bloatware (Score:3)
Mate of mine was in charge of the resident software in one machine
Every now and then he's spot an inefficiency in the software, remove an instruction, save three bytes
They dont make 'em like that any more.
Re:Bloatware (Score:4, Funny)
In my days, we didn't have those fancy 'computer' thingies.
We only had good old Turing Machines!
Me and my 27 brothers would sit along an infinite line of paper for 27 hours a day, and we'd constantly move the pointer, change 1's into spaces and the other way around.
Then, we barely had time to go home, get a spanking from hour father, rape our oldest sister and run back to work, where we had to arrive the day before!
Ah yes, those Turing Machines. They don't make 'em like they used to!
Re:Bloatware (Score:2)
Finnix: Obligatory self-promotion (Score:5, Interesting)
Finnix doesn't really compete with DSL, except for the "damn, this system is hosed, I don't have a recovery CD around, and I don't want to wait to download 700MB for something like Knoppix" crowd.
Slax? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Slax? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perfect for legacy hardware (Score:2, Informative)
And it also lets me practice my machine gun skills in Quake II while I'm waiting for the rest of my party to show up from goodness-knows-where.
What is up with DSL and Samba? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was really disappointed after downloading DSL-N and finding out it still has this same disappointment.
Now, please, somebody make a fool of me. Show me I'm wrong. Tell me there is a way to do a samba connect without downloading anything with DSL or DSL-N.
I don't see the point (Score:2, Interesting)
Well... (Score:2)
Think VMWare + Truecrypt with DSL as the base (Score:5, Informative)
Now if only Truecrypt and VMWare could be automagically installed via apt-get or Synaptic. I can even learn to use the command-line version of Truecrypt, if I could just get it installed in less than an hour. I haven't even tried on DSL yet.
Re:I don't see the point (Score:2)
Damn small runs on Damn thin computers! (Score:4, Interesting)
50 megs? (Score:4, Funny)
Ok, it had absolutely _nothing_ else but it was still damn cool.
16MB with X? (Score:2)
Re:16MB with X? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.angelfire.com/linux/floorzat/2diskXwin
However, I believe your best bet is to avoid X. You need a very minimal hand-built linux that uses the svgalib and links, and maybe seejpeg, to do all graphical stuff. If you put it together consider posting an image of it somewhere.
Re:16MB with X? (Score:2)
Two web browsers!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Two web browsers!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't anyone see.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Can't wait for this to hit PDAs (Score:3, Informative)
Still DSL (Score:3, Interesting)
What's important is the philosophy. The idea of distros like these is to pack as many useful tools as possible into as little space as possible while maintaining minimalism. They remove a lot of the unnecessary stuff and get quite a surprising amount packed into it.
Personally, I carry a flash drive around which will boot on any system supporting USB-ZIP (read the readme.USBKEY file in the syslinux archive for how to do this and why you have to -- but, simply put, very few even modern BIOSes support USB-HDD even today.) Ok, it's a 512 MB model, but, I have to squeeze things in there because I have to store a lot of data, a copy of my browser for those systems that force you to use an old version of Firefox (IE is dead to me) and so on. I LOVE having a handy little live linux distro that can boot off of it and be used to repair/diagnose a lot of problems among other things. I can't afford to have some huge 1 GB large image of Ubuntu or something though on my little flash drive, so that's where a linux distro following this philosophy comes in. Honestly though, I am forced to admit I didn't really like DSL that much (remember, with linux distros it's all a matter of opinion and, as they say "to each to his own." I don't like it because it isn't good, I don't like it because it just isn't the type I want.) Personally I used Finnix [finnix.org] (site's a little slow these past few days or so) which has much more up to date packages. It's one of the many live distros that follow the same sort of philosophy DSL follows. Squeeze handy stuff in there, remove unneeded clutter. It's my hope that we see even MORE distros like this in the future, not less.
Very useful (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite as elegantly small as the QNX Demo Diskette of olden days, which, on one 1.44MB diskette, had an OS, networking stack, GUI, window manager, and Web browser. It was truly amazing. I'm not sure why they have withdrawn this incredible demonstration of their elegant technology. (Has QNX itself become the subject of a bit of bloat, perhaps?) It was limited to one make of network card or serial modem for the networking, which was the main shortcoming of it; but regardless, it was truly unique.
as long as you are mentioning minis... (Score:3, Interesting)
We move from Damn Small Linux to (Score:3, Funny)
Good for (Score:3, Interesting)
Crossing the 50mb level (Score:2)
NetBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Also NetBSD libc is alot smaller than the bloated glibc of linux. The resulting binaries are smaller for standard apps. Kde seems a little faster but perhaps its my imagination.
NetBSD is great for older systems that wont modern software.
i dig it (Score:2, Interesting)
WARNING: Non Updated Mirrors - Torrent (Score:3, Informative)
I've got 9+ hours remaining for this 50M file, someone please tell me there is a torrent.
Jonah Hex
Re:yuk! gtk! Fluxbox is much nicer anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yuk! gtk! Fluxbox is much nicer anyway. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DSL + eye candy? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I just don't get it (Score:3, Informative)