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Damn Small Linux Not So Small
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!'"
Sylpheed is pretty nice. Back when I used GNOME, I tried it as my email client. Really nice, great performance on large folders. (Now I use mutt.)
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
It's also worth mentioning that the original DSL uses a lightweight GUI toolkit called FLTK and Lua for its tools, interesting!
python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
There is a very real need for a quick and dirty distro. What you are describing is a situation where another distro would fit better.
The problem isn't the tool. The problem is you trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
A 50MB distro is called "damn small"? Damn. I remember when Slackware 1.x core came on a couple of floppy disks. And if you wanted a good text editor, you had to find one on Archie and get it yourself. But we were happy in those days. :)
My other car is a cons.
50 megs is a tad arbitrary. I think that 200~ish would be a better number, as it can fit on mini-CDs (yeah I know business card CDs are 50 megs, but I've never even SEEN one before, whereas I find that mini-CDs are small and handy) and it can fit on cheap 256mb flash drives. I'm not advocating bloat, but if there has to be a hard limit I think 50mb is a tad small. I think that the number of people who use mini CD-Rs or 256+ MB flash drives outnumber the people who use business card CD-Rs or 64 MB flash drives by quite a bit. In a 50 MB setup, extrmely useful apps like the OpenOffice.org suite (I say its "extremely useful" more for its compatibility with MS Office than anything else) will never be included by default. With 200+ megs to play with, suddenly OO.o seems like a very natural inclusion. Yes, I know there's an OO.o DSL package; I just think that there should be a default default distro in the 200~ MB range where it (and other useful-but-somewhat-big apps) is included by default.
It has a 2.4 kernel because it still supports older hardware. 2.6 does not. It doesn't even support some not-so-old hardware that 2.4 did, as I've elarned from personal experience.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
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.
There is a distro called Austrumi that is 50MB with e17 installed. I am using it as my main distro and it is nice and fast. Check it out...no I am not involved in the project personally. desNotes
"Saying that Linux is inferior to Windows because more people use Windows is like saying that all restaurants are inferi
Umm... no tool for NTFS resizing, you say? How about the cryptically named ntfsresize(8)? Its author claims it does its job better than Partition Magic or any other commercial or non-commercial tool (ie. it is allegedly the best there is) and it is supported by parted(8).
I got my start remastering DSL, often winding up with 75 MB or so once I put Firefox, etc. in there.
I then switched to Knoppix 3.4, using the 2.4 kernel to support older hardware as mentioned.
Here is my Getting Started Guide, also have a technical blog here.
There are some screenshots available there.
One post that I need to draw your attention to is the one about "testcd" 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.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.