http://www.osnews.com/story/8944/Into_the_World_of_Damn_Small_Linux Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:18:24 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Thanks for the review. The whole turning it into debian sounds very interesting. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 05:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Thank you very much for reviewing the latest version of DSL!

It gets really annoying to see other sites reviewing versions like 0.6.3 (whick is over 6 months old).

DSL only gets better and easier to use with each new version. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 05:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? DSL saved my old laptop from the scrap yard. Running a 133MHz pentium mmx proc and 96 meg ram it is usable once again. You have to try this distro out for older eqipment. Good work John and Robert. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 06:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I just ordered a DSL business card cd a little while ago, and now I see this up on osnews. Go go DSL! Mon, 22 Nov 2004 06:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I just read through the O'Reilly Knoppix Hacks book yesterday, which mentions this. Similar distros (but both focus on security) also mentioned were:

INSERT - http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html
LAS Linux - http://localareasecurity.com/

Anyway, the book is pretty useful. I learned a few things from reading it. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 06:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does anyone have any information about what Siag Office is? Is it some kind of knock-off of Microsoft Office? Mon, 22 Nov 2004 06:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does anyone have any information about what Siag Office is? Is it some kind of knock-off of Microsoft Office?

http://siag.nu/

Small lightweight office package for unix - started around 99 I think!?

Cheers
rob Mon, 22 Nov 2004 06:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sounds good so far.. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 07:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? DSL is by far one of the most usefull distros out there. I carry it in my wallet, and just this weekend I used it to safe my mother's PC from oblivion.

Damn stable, damn fast, damn small.

Viva la DSL

E Mon, 22 Nov 2004 07:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I run DSL (0.8.4) on my 200MMX/64Mb box, and can happily browse around with Firefox, use the Gimp and have my email client running in the background, no sweat.

Also (for a linux install) it's so easy to tinker with. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 09:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Have a Go at DSL based Hikarunix:

http://www.hikarunix.org/ Mon, 22 Nov 2004 09:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Like it's mother distro (knoppix), it is great for both demos and recovery.

However, unlike knoppix it:

-doesn't give the impression linux is slow

-is small enough to fit in your wallet and forget about, so you can always have it on standby.

It's also handy to avoid workstation restrictions, as long as the bios is set to boot from usb or cd ;-) Mon, 22 Nov 2004 12:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://www.tuxs.org/dslwin.htm

This is such a great distro! Mon, 22 Nov 2004 13:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=181&sli... Mon, 22 Nov 2004 13:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? i added the option "dsl toram" and it seems to run faster. it says you need 128 meg for this.

it installs great to hard drive, and is very light. i plan on trying the embedded version next, as an alternative to ZipSlack. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 15:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What is even cooler is doing a frugal install onto a 64meg or larger CF card, then by using a Cf to Ide adapter watching it boot completely noisless. All info on how to do this is available in the DSL forums. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 16:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What do you use to save your hapless windows friend's pictures and other files when something goes wrong? DSL! It also works well installed on the hard drive. I havent done that in a long time, and it worked pretty well then, so it should be even better now. Great distribution. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 16:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? did i mention use "dsl toram" when booting??? loads the entire OS into a ramdisk on machines with over 64 mb ram, i think. This allows you to remove the cd, so you can burn cds and what not. And just the coolness of having your computer run without any disk acess whatsoever. haha. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 16:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Some progress made in DSL with the real office suite, but this one's still better. http://sourceforge.net/projects/austrumi/ . Abiword, gnumeric, the gimp, opera, nmapfe, a few games, mingw, plenty of games and even mplayer (including graphical support), all in 50mb. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Austrumi has the apps, but I can't get it to boot on 3 out of 4 of my computers. It seems to have a lack of hardware support. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have used DSL since 0.3.11, and I am impressed at how much this distro seems to "evolve" with each new release becoming more and more useful, all the while staying so... well... damn small. ^_^

Kudos to the DSL team! Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was sitting around wishing I had an underpowered 486 machine lying around so I could run desktop Linux on ... Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "I was sitting around wishing I had an underpowered 486 machine lying around so I could run desktop Linux on ..."

Poor guy. I'll bet you feel just horrible after all those sleepless nights waiting for this release. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 19:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? As far as knoppix hacks go, if you're going to use INSERT linux, you might as well use the hack from www.ultimatebootcd.com

check it out. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 19:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does anyone know about some intentions of having other languages to enjoy DSl??

I'm from Brazil and would be very useful if portuguese language was added. Would save a lot of machines at my work. Here we use "conectiva 10" and some knoppix versions. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 20:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does anybody know which editor it is in this screenshot:
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=181&sli... Mon, 22 Nov 2004 20:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? At least it looks very much like SciTe. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 20:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It is scite. Mon, 22 Nov 2004 21:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I run damnsmall on an ancient 90MHz laptop, and it is actually usable; even useful. Really amazing work guys. Tue, 23 Nov 2004 03:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I fiddled around with an earlier version, and was impressed. But I never did figure out how to get it to print. How does DSL handle printing these days? Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have two old systems
1. 75Mhz (90 if on turbo - oooh!) 16Meg ram and 504Meg HD
took me a bunch of floppies to install but its there
2. 133Mhz Compaq with 32Meg ram and 2.1Gig hd, w/docking station, everything works and its soo much faster than win98!

Excellent distro...fast, small, and very easy to use
Great job DSL team! Tue, 23 Nov 2004 19:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments