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Damn Small Linux

He might have a problem getting it to work,driver wise. He also said he wanted USB support,which is a royal PITA. Might I suggest you look into either Puppy Linux,DSL Linux or Feather Linux. I have put all three on many different kinds of hardware and they are all quite fast. You did not give the specs of your hardware so I will just give you my general observations. For older hardware Feather will give you the most speed,followed by DSL and Puppy,but there is only a few seconds difference.

That said I much prefer Puppy,as there are several builds and you can simply choose which version suits you. On a laptop MacPuppy is quite nice,and I have my most used programs at my fingertips thanks to the dock. But any one of these will give you the requirements you specified in your FA: Quick boot,USB support,and easy text editing. If you have USB 2.0 and a fast flash stick you might even prefer to leave the OS on the stick,which will allow you to carry your Operating System envirnment with you in your pocket. I hope this helps,and have a good weekend!

You can always boot DSL or other minimal distro off a USB drive. I believe you can even boot off CF and other types of cards if your BIOS supports it.

Well, you can always trade in lifetime to recover more of those precious gigabytes...

• You can go through all your packages and remove those that you don't need. Many dependencies are not mandatory.
• You can remove documentation and meta-files that you don't need.
• You can enable compression in your filesystem.
• You can switch to gentoo where you get to decide which libraries every individual app will link to - and shave off even the last megabytes.
• If that's still not enough you are always free to grow your own, perhaps around dietlibc or uclibc.
• Ofcourse you also can always advantage of prior art in those areas.

But I suggest you simply do what everybody does: Buy a bigger disk and stop whining. Or live with the trade-off you made by going SSD.

"Just look at those specs, man. 128Mb of RAM, 400Mhz CPU. There's a shitload a person [b]can't[/b] reasonably do with that machine without obscene amounts of disk thrashing (assuming it even has a disk):"

Poppycock. Damn Small Linux will fly on this baby. As will OpenBSD (and every other BSD) with a lean windowmanager like wm. Just because YOU aren't able to use anything but bloatsoft, doesn't mean the rest of us can't.

To DSL.

50MB .iso for installation or to run as a live CD. It fits on a business card form factor CD. That's not just the OS. It's the OS, the Window Environment, all of the applications - to include multiple browsers (yes firefox!), chat, VOIP, spreadsheet, email client. A fully functional network OS with Server or Client profiles with advanced package management to add your favorite debian applications. Last major release July 2008.

Runs on (gasp) A 80486 with 16MB of RAM. Do you remember when that was an enterprise server costing $10,000+? Some of us do. Runs well on a P50 with 48MB or better. That is to say the software is modular and well integrated. The OS doesn't consume more resources than is required. Getting nostalgia yet? It makes a great base for virtual machines.

That's what I consider the low end of usable. And you? How many gigglehurts does it take to recalc your checkbook spreadsheet?

Do you know how they get all of that into such small requirements? They care. That's all. They just care. Is it that hard to care?

To DSL.

50MB .iso for installation or to run as a live CD. It fits on a business card form factor CD. That's not just the OS. It's the OS, the Window Environment, all of the applications - to include multiple browsers (yes firefox!), chat, VOIP, spreadsheet, email client. A fully functional network OS with Server or Client profiles with advanced package management to add your favorite debian applications. Last major release July 2008.

Runs on (gasp) A 80486 with 16MB of RAM. Do you remember when that was an enterprise server costing $10,000+? Some of us do. Runs well on a P50 with 48MB or better. That is to say the software is modular and well integrated. The OS doesn't consume more resources than is required. Getting nostalgia yet? It makes a great base for virtual machines.

That's what I consider the low end of usable. And you? How many gigglehurts does it take to recalc your checkbook spreadsheet?

Do you know how they get all of that into such small requirements? They care. That's all. They just care. Is it that hard to care?

Something like this is probably better for you, especially with the heatsink-case and special-purpose power supply. The power coming from a car's alternator/battery would be hell on a normal supply.

Granted this is a bit pricey, but this is just one I've seen from memory - I'm sure there are plenty of other "car PC" systems out there for *nix/BSD/etc, and there's lots of parts available to build it yourself too.

Use either DSL or puppy. I have used both on older hardware and installed on the HDD the boot is very fast. You could probably speed up the process even more if you compiled it for the specific hardware.

Take a look at DSL and Puppy Linux. Both are tiny and would boot quickly from a CompactFlash. DSL is probably better for all-around appliance use; Puppy is intended for use as a desktop OS.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

http://www.puppylinux.org/

steveha

there is " damn small linux " http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ you could even install it in the /boot partition of fedora as a backup os

Encapsulation, scope, etc etc, is 101 stuff. I find it hard to believe any programmer, OSS or not, doesn't know them. Are we talking script kiddies perhaps?

Stripped down Liunx is far from a myth. (Try 50MB DSL http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) That why it's used in embedded devices. Some of which you can find at:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/

You don't have to start with a big fat distro. A full desktop system is silly for kiosk, I would argue so is x86.

Yes all this can be said for WindowCE (which you should be using over XP any day for this kind of thing!!!), but the difference is that Linux is the same OS, from watch to super computer.

D-Bus dependencies don't seam that crazy if you don't count the all the bindings (if you are including Mono, what did you expect?)

http://www.emdebian.org/packages/search.php?package=dbus

My T22 (P3 900, 256, WiFi) runs openSUSE 10.3 with either KDE 3 or Joe's Window Manager that I discovered by trying out DamnSmallLinux.
Basically all I use my laptop for is running NX to my home machine, so a light fast small desktop is the best solution.

On the compatibility side, I do have to run ndiswrapper to make my Linksys PCMCIA WiFi work, but once it is in, KNetworkManager takes care of all the complicated stuff.

I had this exact requirement for building my point of sale device. My solution was to go with something like Damn Small Linux and modifying it. Basically, I altered it to be apt enabled yet again instead of using their package management and then pointed it at the debian repos. One apt-get install later and I had everything I needed to host a .NET GUI application. You could probably get away with a minimal debian install as well, but DSL and its brethren generally have good package selection for smallness.

I've been reading up a lot on flash drive technology recently, and it's seems that Xandros on the eee has been tuned somewhat to run well on flash (unionfs, run mostly in RAM, etc) to ensure that not to many writes are made to the flash drive. Generally most flash today is NAND based and has 100K write/erase cycles - some embedded-quality industrial flash drives have better ECC, wear levelling and bad block management to go somewhat higher (but you then pay more for the CF or SD card) - so it's important to do this to extend flash drive's lifetime. However the trend is for low-end flash to use MLCs (>1 bit per cell, vs SLCs which have 1 bit per cell) - drives using MLCs typically have even lower flash lifetime (10K write cycles), and the flash drive manufacturers are usually vague on this, particularly the cheaper ones.

The write cycles are across each individual erase block (something like 32 to 128 Kbyte), not per sector/page. Bad block management is critical to 'wear levelling' - as one erase block gets worn out (flagged by ECC) the data is moved across to a new erase block. As long as there are enough good erase blocks and you aren't doing a lot of writes to every part of the drive, there should be enough good blocks around to substitute for bad blocks. There's also work to ensure that if power is lost while multiple pages are written to an erase block, the drive can detect which were written OK - it then reads these and writes them to a new erase block, marking the old erase block as bad. The flash drive has a software Flash Translation Layer (FTL) that hides all this complexity, and the better vendors put more effort into good FTLs.

So... Some care is needed to install another Linux distro, or standard XP, onto the eee - not to get it installed, but to avoid wearing out the eee's flash drives too quickly. There are various flash-optimised Linux distros including Damn Small Linux (DSL, http://damnsmalllinux.org/ Puppy, SLAX, Debian Live (http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/), etc, which manage to write infrequently to flash by running from a RAM disk (with no swap on flash, or at least reduced 'swappiness' parameter) and using unionfs or aufs to map a RAM drive 'over' the flash drive, allowing writes to be delayed until much later, and thereby minimising number of flash writes. DSL writes only when you shut down, or on demand, and Puppy writes every 30 minutes or so. Generally, Live CD distros are quite easily adapted to run well with flash, whereas hard disk distros do not run well on flash.

Ubuntu for eee looks very nice if you like Ubuntu, but doesn't do any flash optimisation that I could see from its wiki (apart from recommending use of noatime in fstab which is quite basic) - perhaps someone has done this as an add-on though. XP embedded apparently has some tweaks to do the same thing as Linux, but you need to be quite a techie to find and apply the flash optimisations, compared to simply installing Damn Small Linux which is already flash optimised.

There seems to be a lot of confusion on this - a good summary of this from eee perspective is http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=297632. However, some people actually advocate removing unionfs from the eee Xandros setup in order to gain some flexibility, without even mentioning the issue of increased flash wear - see http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:removeunionfs which also suggests use of ext3 which will further increase flash writes (default is to write to log every 5 seconds typically). This is a really bad idea... I would really suggest reading up on this before changing the default setup, which uses unionfs in a similar way to DSL and Puppy Linux to minimise flash writes.

Does anyone know a major distro that runs on the eee and is already flash optimised to minimise writes?

I've been testing Puppy and Damn Small Linux (DSL, http://damnsmalllinux.org/) recently on a Thinkpad 560 with 96 MB RAM. Both are well optimised for booting from flash drives. Even if you have a PC that won't boot from Flash normally, you can still use Flash either with a boot floppy (WakePup for Puppy, DSL Boot USB for DSL), or with a Compact Flash card if it's a laptop - this appears as an IDE disk even to the BIOS, typically. Compact Flash should be faster than a USB drive and it's very easy to get a CF to PCMCIA connector (try hdparm -tT /dev/sdX1 to test read speeds).

Both work very fast - Puppy is better for Windows refugees who haven't yet learnt much about Linux, and is a bit more fragmented (it has 3 software installation mechanisms, some by the community and one by the author), and seemed less stable (only the package installation process though). The forums are very active but hosted on a slow server, and the Wiki is not too complete. Generally I found it hard to get the best information as there are many related websites that each have part of the story, but Puppy is very impressive and is particularly good on flash drives. Puppy has many different variants as well as the official ones, which can make it hard to work out which one to use, but that shows it has a very active community. However there is only one core developer.

DSL feels slicker in some ways but has less eye candy - it uses Knoppix hardware detection, which is of course excellent, although in my case I had to play with settings to get X11 to work. You can even use apt-get (with some limitations) to install Debian Woody. It works very well on Flash drives (USB or CF) - as with Puppy and many other live CDs, you can do a 'frugal' install in which a single file hosts a loop filesystem, minimising the writes to the Flash and thus improving lifetime of your Flash drive (a big issue as a given flash drive 'erase block' lasts only 10,000 to 100,000 writes). Like Puppy, it has a good mechanism for automatically saving your configuration and other RAM disk based state into the flash drive, though Puppy is slightly more automatic. Also, DSL includes vim by default, and is more focused on good command line tools as well as GUI tools, e.g. you can easily upgrade from BusyBox tools to GNU tools. Puppy tries to do everything through the GUI, so the vi sucks (actually e3vi, a very incomplete emulation).

Basically, if you are a Linux newbie, use Puppy, but if you know a little more about Linux already, use DSL. Since each distro will take quite a lot of configuration and learning about how it does things (quite different to Fedora or Ubuntu), it's best to choose the one you feel most comfortable with for longer term.

Um, the 'big three' (ubuntu, fedora, suse) ALL fit on one CD, as they all have liveCDs. And on that one CD (ubuntu at least, been a while since I messed with the othe rones) you get:
An OS, a window manager, a desktop environment, tons of games, an office suite, an image editor, a DVD writer, a ton of 3D effects, a ton of screensavers, etc.

To compare, on the vista DVD, you get:
An OS+window manager+desktop environment (and you can't choose which ones), some games, a few screensavers, 3-4 3D effects, and that's pretty much it. And when installed it takes up what, like 10 gigs?

And as far as the 6 CDs or 1 DVD Linux downloads, these include ALL packages, so if you don't have internet access you can still install all your stuff. But Most of them you don't even need. I just set up a LAMP server today (no gui). I used CDs 1 and 2. That's it. And about 90% was from CD1. So yeah, I would say Linux is pretty damn small indeed.

http://damnsmalllinux.org/network-install.html

• Get TOMSRTBT and boot it
• Configure network
• Download install script
• Download image and use install script

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

This got modded Funny, but it brings up a valid point. Isn't this "story" just talking about having something like, oh I don't know, GRUB installed and then a lightweight Linux distro (like Xubuntu, DSL-N, or Zenwalk)? It just seems like they're describing something that's neither news, nor particularly unique. Hell, the article even states that this "Splashtop" is based on Linux.

There are distribution creators pushing to many different directions. One of them is keeping it small. I think the growth of the 'operating system' will more or less flatten out.

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

I wonder why Vista sales remain flat, if not damn small, despite the gutsy efforts of Microsoft's marketing department. Surely a newly minted OS from the same folks that brought us notepad.exe would make consumers as excited as a new puppy.

> What ever happened to minimal?

You would like to have a light Linux distribution? Something like this perhaps:

http://www.puppylinux.com/
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/about.htm
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

As powerful as phones are getting, I should be able to run something like DSL on a phone soon. It would only require the phone to have 48M memory free for the OS.

And then I could get rid of my home machine and replace it with this - oh, and one of these.

I would finally buy a cell phone if I could have such a device... I'll wait to see if any "open" cell phone will give me that.

As powerful as phones are getting, I should be able to run something like DSL on a phone soon. It would only require the phone to have 48M memory free for the OS.

And then I could get rid of my home machine and replace it with this - oh, and one of these.

I would finally buy a cell phone if I could have such a device... I'll wait to see if any "open" cell phone will give me that.

Last week I resurrected an IBM Thinkpad (~1Ghz, munged 18G HD, 1600x1200x32, broken DVD and dead net port) using Damn Small Linux, booting from floppy and running off a USB key.

It's a fine system. Shoehorning everything to be able to run on a 16MB 486DX system makes a system with plenty of resources run fast.

I'm considering switching from the bloated hulk that is Fedora, which I have to use at work.

Either Damn Small Linux or Slax is what you want - easily customizable, easy to use, good browser experience, runs from either a CD or a USB Flash Drive, minimal machine requirements, can be loaded completely into memory for speed. And if somehow, somebody crashes it - just turn the machine off and on again and you're back in business...

Also, should you need bookmarks that can be easily added to, just use one of the online bookmark services - no need to worry about saving bookmarks on the local machine.

Or just use the old dd command (it's short for "donvert and dopy" -- the obvious "convert and copy" abbreviation was already taken), which is found on pretty much every live / system rescue CD. I mostly use DSL or Slax, because they're small, but Knoppix works. I can't really recommend tomsrtbt anymore (shame; Lua is such an interesting language) due to the demise of floppy drives. Boot from CD, plug in and mount a USB HDD (not included; this must be bigger than the partition you want to back up), # dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/windows_image & (if = input file = the drive partition you wish to backup, of = output file = a (new) file on the HDD. You'll get a response like [1] 1234 - note down the number after the square brackets. Typing # kill -USR1 1234 -- substitute the number you wrote down before in place of 1234 -- will give you a progress report.

Later, if you're into that sort of thing, you can compress the image using bzip2 (it'll shrink well, since most of it will just be freshly-formatted disk space) and save it onto a bootable DVD. Change the DVD's /etc/motd to show the instructions to unzip the file into its rightful place (it'll be something like # bunzip2 /windows_image.bz2 > /dev/hda1 but depends on where you got it from and where you put it; do not be tempted to skip this step, because you will forget in the meantime how it was done) and put away in a safe place.

Puppy Linux

Damn Small Linux

Try a live CD of either one. They should work fine on your specs.

Go to damn small linux and at the store:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/

Thank you for the helpful response this time round.

My biggest worry with going down the Adblock route is whether sloppily-coded (i.e., most) layouts will break once the ads disappear. Have you had any problem with this?

I do have an Insprion 1505 coming, Dell takes nearly 3 weeks now to build one, and will run Rapidweather Remaster of Knoppix Linux (See screenshots, below) on it, with the "toram" cheatcode, since we will have 2GB of RAM. I'll have to use the network cable for broadband, I don't have a driver for the new Intel wireless setup in the 1505. I have run it on one other 1505, so I know it will boot up OK.

If you need an OS, Damn Small Linux is intended for such hardware. The forums have helpful folks should you encounter problems.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Check it out here:

The Damn Small Machine!

This guy is the same guy who produces the distro Damn Small Linux. The distro is basically Knoppix cut down to fit within a 50MB CD. Well, he decided, being a tree-hugger California type, to build fanless and low-power boxes for people to buy. They use VIA's low-power (8 watt peak) x86 "Eden" CPU's and are actually pretty good.

There are now even newer ones by other folks which use the VIA C7; I saw a couple of models at TigerDirect. The C7, while requiring a fan for the highest CPU speeds, goes up to 2.0GHz and uses 20W at full tilt, max. If I didn't already have a bunch of computers (I'm an IT consultant), I'd have bought one already. Matter of fact, my next one will indeed be one of these.

Damn Small Linux ( http://damnsmalllinux.org/ ) has a link to a mini itx store with via chipsets. You could build one of those. Some are fanless. Also immediately change your power supply. I use Antec and their better ones are dead quiet. Get an improved processor fan/heatsink like ones from Zalman. Use a case with good airflow. These will provide some relief and perhaps an energy efficient Hard Drive would help. Try letting it sleep much of the day and if you need it to wake to perform tasks you can schedule them. Steve

Use boot: dsl toram

Power off system when done.

I accept your challenge.

I just think that you could get a really cheap "Damn Small Machine", goto here http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Syste ms really cheap computers with usable hardware AND you can get LCDs here http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/TFT_LCD LCDs are 7 Inches! And run on only 9w. I would think this is a pretty good solution.

I just think that you could get a really cheap "Damn Small Machine", goto here http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Syste ms really cheap computers with usable hardware AND you can get LCDs here http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/TFT_LCD LCDs are 7 Inches! And run on only 9w. I would think this is a pretty good solution.

I just think that you could get a really cheap "Damn Small Machine", goto here http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Syste ms
really cheap computers with usable hardware AND you can get LCDs here
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/TFT_LCD
LCDs are 7 Inches! And run on only 9w.
I would think this is a pretty good solution.

I just think that you could get a really cheap "Damn Small Machine", goto here http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Syste ms
really cheap computers with usable hardware AND you can get LCDs here
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/TFT_LCD
LCDs are 7 Inches! And run on only 9w.
I would think this is a pretty good solution.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/usb.html
Honestly why even mess around with Windows?

Granted from the standpoint of security, USB booting and having access
to that person's hard drive is a little iffy. I would say some one
should come up with a way to mitigate this kind of security breach
while still allowing USB booting. I'm guessing, but that would probably
bring some kindof DRM problem.

Any one know more about this?

Crap, preview is my friend.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Yeah, Damn Small Linux is good, but I prefer Puppy Linux because I've found it to be more easily customizable. Using Puppy Unleashed, I've made a custom version that includes the software I consider essential (vim, screen, sshfs, mplayer, mp3blaster, ratpoison, etc). Each of those is not available on the standard live-cd, but I added them to my custom version - and got them working the way I like - with a few hours of work. Most of that time was spent burning test CD-RW's to make sure that everything interacted correctly (elinks needs to know how to play nice with screen, ~/.bashrc needs to included vim specific variables, among other details).

Boot process (for my somewhat large ~85MB version) is under 1 min on the machine I most recently tested (a 1.4ghz athalon box with 512MB RAM). That is faster than the WinXP boot process for that machine. Several versions of Puppy fit on a 50MB buisiness card sized CD and load even faster.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Likewise, I expect a Free operating system to load and play without giving one second of thought to paying Microsoft to make it all work. This Linux distro can load into a RAM disk that takes 5 percent of the 1 GiB of RAM in a modern PC, and then I can eject the CD and do whatever I want with the computer until I shut it down.

One of the great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is the ability to make use of older hardware.

but may I point out that the average Linux distro is even bigger than the full XP? SuSE Linux for example (to use an example from everyone's favourite, Novell) comes on a DVD or more than half a dozen CDs. Compressed. So that wouldn't fit there either.

My god what the hell were the mods thinking here? Check out D.S.L. (damn small linux) Knoppix or just tailor your own distribution as you'd like. You can add or remove things to any distribution I've ever used to get it to fit comfortably on a CD worth (or smaller) or spread across many dvds. The variability is huge, you just complained that if you add excessive amounts of voluntary things that it is more bloated than Windows XP. Damn man you should win some kind of award for most conspicuously retarded thing written this week.

"Only" 300 MB? ;)

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ - 50MB, including a couple of web browsers (inc. firefox), spreadsheet, word processor, email, media player, PDF viewer, web server, etc. And it'll run on a 486.

I have a Linux DNS and Mail server, which also does my spam filtering, and the *hard drive* is only 250MB (the spam data is stored on a separate MySQL server, though, so maybe that doesn't count). :)