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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
You are going to die alone.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
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.
"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.
But then it wouldn't be Damn Small, now would it?
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, that's nothing!
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!
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
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
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.
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.
"Who says you can't make monet from free software !"
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
My Commodore 64 goes from power button to booted in 2 seconds, beat that!