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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!'"
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!
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
the bloat war has. :D)
(bloat war/bloatware? get it? get it?! ah I am teh funny
Global warming is a cube.
just give me Firefox, a net connection and leave the rest to extensions
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
> If they could do all this in 50 megs, imagine what they could do in more space.
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.
and I must say, for desktop use, when you need linux real quick or want to boot off a CF card or USB drive, this will do the job just about every time :)
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
First, for people who just need a quick formatting tool, it's good enough with the MyDSL extensions making it nice and simple to use for a lot of USB boot type applications.
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.
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.
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.
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)
It runs well on old hardware.. Plenty of us have old pentium 1/2 machines around that aren't doing a whole lot. Windows 98 keeps becoming a worse and worse option with viruses and now the lack of updates. It provides life for an old computer. I ran it for a period of time on a 166 when both of my other machines went down, and while it wasn't super fast, it did everything I needed it to. Plus, I didn't have to go through the trouble of finding a win 98 cd and a key. It's a neat idea, very portable, and has grown a lot as a distro since its early days.
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.
down to 50 or less megs, even if the markets are driving the size of bloatware or there is actually a market for a phat DSL distro. One of the cool things about it is the size, not its functionality (other than it is fully functional for more than say 90% of the user's needs in the world). Its also a really cool little tool to install on used computers that folks are thinking of tossing away, or have tossed away. I have made inroads with folks using Linux as their major OS with DSL (for size) and Knoppix (for its ease of install and wonderful GUI experience). Bottomline, keep it small, fast and wonderful.
"If they could do all this in 50 megs, imagine what they could do in more space."
stop calling it Damn Small Linux for one.
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Fluxbox is a window manager. GTK is a UI toolkit. They don't even compete; you're comparing apples and oranges.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Apples and oranges are both fruit. More like comparing apples and a drill press.
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.
Not all DSL users stick to the CD based install. Some, I'm sure, switch to USB thumb drives for portable operation. A version of DSL designed to fit within 150 megs or so would be perfect for larger thumb drives.
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.
...to copy the memory key, DSL, OO, 128MB free personal disk space, and all.
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.
50meg? - give me a break!!!
... which had a 256 byte PROM, everything else needed to be loaded from the teletype.
... and use the freed-up space to add four new features.
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.
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.
There is a good example what can be done within 192 mb what is the smallest practical size - the size of small CD. And the example: http://slax.org/ it is a microlinux with KDE and lot's of useful stuff, also modificable with some 800 packages ready to add.
Always put off dealing with time-wasting morons. If you would like to know how... I'll get back to you
The box I play around on is an old i586, so most modern distros won't even get past boot. And if they do, they end up using most if not all of my memory, drive space, and usually a sizeable chunk of the swap as well. And what does DSL go and do? Uses about 30MB of memory, ~1GB of space on a full install, and boots up nice and fast.
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.
I like DSL and I've used it extensively, but I cannot deal with having to get online to connec to an on-line download server before having Samba. That just sucks. Sure, you can carry it on a thumb drive as an extension, but it would be so much easier if it was part of DSL.
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.
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.
50 MB is small in relative terms. Today, there are very few distros that even fit on one CD. Besides, as times change, so does the price of portable storage (and the capacity). I'm running DSL right now from a free 64 MB thumb drive. Of course, that means I don't have quite enough space for DSL-N, but oh well.
From a usability point-of-view, I don't see the point in having this damn small linux, but maybe that's because I would see the use of this thing only in the perspective of an admin. You see, if I want big, I'll use knoppix, or kororaa; if we're talking about small (and fitted with a floppy drive), then 1.4 MB is the max. And you can still fit a linux kernel (albeit one customized for the hardware), a libc, a shell and some disk-tools on that. That's great for repairs, or bootstrapping your old 386 and using it for vi. From the point-of-view of hardware, I also have a difficulty understanding why this is usefull; the devices in question have to be fitted with CD- or floppy-drives, so we're talking PCs here; if a PC had 50 MB of diskspace (say, a 386 or a 486; they're not using compression, are they ?) then all this fancy-schmansy gtk stuff is just going to kill it. Any PC above that would have a CD drive that I could stick a fully loaded CD in. And any PC that could really play the gtk stuff well, would have to be post-pentium at least. So, other than 'because we can' I see no answers that a project like this provides.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I was using DSL on a pentium II 350 mhz computer for the last few months and I loved it, that's the beauty of DSL, more so than the "small" in terms of size, the thing part is of huge usefulness! What's the street value of a PII 350? $0.5? Seriously, it's a free computer someone gave me when we installed new hardware at their location, I threw it in my graveyard, and for a while made it a DOS V6.x game box (it's back to that role now, I eventually got bored and bought a modern computer) but during its run of several months I've been web browsing on it from home and haven't had any problem running firefox.
DSL is nice, but it's got a 2.4 kernel, PuppyLinux (one bone) fits in 25M and gives you a 2.6 kernel with all the accompanying hardware support goodness. To me that makes DSL very 2003, it's playing catch up in my books.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Pfft, I remember playing with a bootable floppy containing QNX with a complete GUI, web browser, texteditor and full network support.
Ok, it had absolutely _nothing_ else but it was still damn cool.
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
Why in the world would they need two web browsers?
Something that people see as bloat aren't, really. Take, for example, a good configuration interface. You decide instead of a rigidly defined text file or a simple binary dump you are going to have XML files underlying your config. Further, there's going to be a nice GUI interface to access them, with checks to make sure all input is in an acceptable range not just to predefined limits but with regards to other options chosen, and a robust context help system. You might find in the end that this is a significant part of your program. It's not trivial to do all that. However it's not bloat, it makes it much easier to use your program and to interact with it. The GUI/help aspect means that users need bery little knowledge to get things set how they want. The robust XML config files mean that other programs can easily interface with yours.
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.
...the value of having an extendable utilitarian linux distro in their wallet, credit card sized and 7 grams in weight, that will work pretty much on any tray load CD PC? I've used it to show off linux, test garage sale finds, check email in a pinch at a friends house without changing their system at all, troubleshoot sick systems, etc...
Familiar's Opie and GPE can help breathe new life into PDAs ( http://hackndev.com/palm/tx ) but they still seems somewhat limited compared to packages DSL provides...
The object of DSL wasn't to be so tiny you are amazed. The object was for it to fit on a business card CDR due to their small size and convenience. Well, business card CDRs are rare if at all made anymore. On the other hand, a mini-CDR still exists and is quite common (you can walk in Walmart and come out with some. Heck, I still have a bunch of mini-CDRW discs lying around for their handy nature.) These 8 cm radius discs can hold 210 MiB, possibly a bit more since, unlike with the DVD standard, back when they made the CD-R standard they actually didn't feel a need to try to cheat and trick the customer. If you think about it, since the smallest flash drive you can buy in a modern store is 128 MB (even if that may only be around 110 MiB or so,) you can't even find the old mini-CDRs that only held 185 MiB anymore, and finally business card discs are rare if at all existant anymore (and nearly no more convenient than a mini-CDR really) it just seems a little silly to be limited to 50 MiB for the sake of discs that if you actually had, you would not want to waste on that.
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 (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.
Since it's inception, I have used DSL frequently as a recovery tool. And it's gotten quite a bit better since the early days (a lot more GUI stuff, and such). For those who argue the "Damn Small" name isn't appropriate for a 50M distribution, don't forget that most distributions these days take multiple 650MB CD's and/or a lot of downloads after installing. At, say 5% of a two-CD Linux install, it is indeed "Damn Small."
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.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
..I'll plug Austrumi, similar size at 50 megs, 2.6 kernel, loads right to RAM and ejects the disk (freeing up the optical drive), and now comes with enlightenment 17 as the stock windows manager.
You might want to check this out:
. htm
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.
Not Too Big Linux and from there to Won't Fit on a DVD Linux.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
DSL is only good for those moments when you visit a friend who insists on using Windows but you hate it. Just take out your little 1-4gb flash drive with DSL on it. You won't be stuck with using Windows if you don't have your laptop with you or allows people without a laptop to be more mobile.
\
NetBSD is not only small but uses significantly alot less ram for a slim base install.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
after a little messin with, I got DSL to work on my Toshiba Satellite 425CDS, p100 mhz with 16mb of ram.. used the Install To HD feature, and it worked like a charm.. the reason I went with a distro like DSL, is because first of all its a livecd, with tons of bundled drivers for all sorts of hardware, including my 16-bit PCMCIA nic cards, and modem card.. many distros like Mandriva, Fedora, even Slackware and Debian had issues installing on this laptop.. i tried Fbsd, and it installed ok.. however, i didnt have nearly enough HD space to upgrade to a STABLE release.. even once it was installed, I couldn't even get my PCMCIA devices to work.. so i wasn't even going to try netbsd.. NetBSD is great on one of my old desktops, but for this old lappy, DSL was the way to go.. its a perfectly functioning portable computer, with a lightweight and small distro, with all the apps I need for now..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Some people can find actual uses for old hardware. Because the idea of turning an older box into a firewall etc escapes you doesn't mean others should abandone otherwise useful hardware. Besides the main point of DSL is use as an admin tool.
The only mirror showing file dsl-3.0.1.iso 20-Jun-2006 is http://dsl.thegeekery.com/current, all the rest, including ibiblio, only have dsl-n-0.1RC1.iso 01-May-2006.
I've got 9+ hours remaining for this 50M file, someone please tell me there is a torrent.
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Why I remember the QNX demo floppy disk (all 1.44MB) packing the OS (posix compliant), GUI, PPP or networking, Web browser, file browser, and several demo applications including web server, vector graphics program and a text editor. Pffft kids today ...
I can just imagine Steve Ballmer going "With DAMN SMALL LINUX, you can get TWO WEBBROWSERS, a PDF READER, a MPEG PLAYER, a PAINT PROGRAM, a CD BURNING TOOL, and MUCH MUCH MORE!... in how much do you think? HOW MUCH? 500 MEGABYTES? A THOUSAND? NO! It's just 83 MEGABYTES! 83 MEGABYTES!"