Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Damn Small Linux Not So Small

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the web-popularity-contest dept.

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!'"

9 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Thumbdrive by daranz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Personally, I carry it around on a thumbdrive... with qemu-win. It serves no purpose besides lauching it on people's computers and telling them "Look, it's Linux under your Windows!" Best thing is, I still fit plenty of other crap on the same, 1GB drive.

    --
    This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
    1. Re:Thumbdrive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, I really like the QEMU option. It is especially comforting to Windows users weary (for good reason, Sony...) about booting or running anything from CD they don't understand.

      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.

  2. Good, but not perfect... Knoppix is a pain by green+pizza · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've played with Damn Small Linux, but anymore I pretty much just take the time to roll my own LinuxFromScratch.

    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.

  3. why I love linux by free+space · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I had an old unused Pentium II machine running Windows 95. I reformatted the hard drive, installed DSLinux and used it as a file server/CVS repository. It had some glitches but essentially it's like having a new low end PC for free.

    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.

  4. Re:I would guess at two reasons for the numbers by ZachPruckowski · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Or to save a lot of space? I recall reading an article about making a cheap file server. It basically consisted of 4 x 250GB HDDs in a case with some crappy Sempron. They used a cheap $10 USB stick with DSL to run it, and only connected a borrowed monitor and keyboard to set up Samba and the networking. Otherwise, they'd have had to use space on the disks, or trade one disc out for a CD-ROM to run and boot CD.

  5. Size/ability tradeoff was always available by rbrander · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I managed to get DSL working on a 256MB USB key. Then I installed their package for OpenOffice, which was 75MB all by itself. OK, my USB key is now 50% taken up by DSL+OO, and half empty for my files.

    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 ...to copy the memory key, DSL, OO, 128MB free personal disk space, and all.

    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.

  6. Finnix: Obligatory self-promotion by fo0bar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just thought I'd do some shameless advertising and mention my distro, Finnix. It's a 100MB livecd that has no X, desktops, productivity tools, etc... but makes up for it by having a ton of sysadmin utilities, such as LVM detection and cryptsetup. It's basically the CD you carry around to help fix broken systems. There's also a PPC port, obviously can be booted from a thumb drive, as well as within Xen/UML virtualization systems.

    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.

  7. Smoothwall. by twitter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I had an old unused Pentium II machine running Windows 95. I reformatted the hard drive, installed DSLinux and used it as a file server/CVS repository. It had some glitches but essentially it's like having a new low end PC for free.

    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?

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  8. Re:16MB with X? by RGRistroph · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You might want to check this out:

    http://www.angelfire.com/linux/floorzat/2diskXwin. htm

    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.