This guide explains how to expand Damn Small Linux to fit your needs. “For those unfamiliar with the Distro, DSL is a severely stripped down version of Debian/Knoppix. The distribution aims to include as many useful applications as possible while remaining under 50MB. It uses a 2.4 series kernel, busybox, a tiny little Xserver, Fluxbox as the default WM, and a host of other microscopic office, media and Internet applications. It is designed to be easily expandable by via a system called ‘MyDSL’.”
Explains very simply and specifically how to do it. I haven’t actually done it, but with this, how can you go wrong? And I’ll definitely have a go with this beside me.
DSL is OK, but the problem is the apps. If you cannot manage to give people gnumeric and abiword working at acceptable speed, give them W98 instead. Giving them the spreadsheet and editor that ship with DSL will not cut it. DSL-not is an interesting alternative. But this method lets you customize basic DSL to exactly what you want. Good one!
The problem with MyDSL is that the apps are updated very sporadically, meaning that some apps that you would like to use in an otherwise sparse and fast OS aren’t easily an option.
Having said that, I haven’t looked into building my own DSL extensions as I’m not that techically oriented. But, DSL is fast enough and nice enough to make me want to try!
You just get synaptic, and then get apps from debian. The problem I found is that installing one or two apps didn’t seem to work. Tellico in particular was one. But that was in earlier releases, probably they have fixed it by now. If you get synaptic you are not limited to mydsl and in principle should be able to install anything.
You don’t need to be technical to get and use synaptic on dsl. The article however explains how to make your own remastered live CD, once you have used synaptic to set it up how you want, and that is admittedly a bit trickier.
The authors of DSL have said that apt-get in not the preferred way to use DSL.
One of the great things about dsl and the mydsl system is that you can use the compressed disk image as the base file system, allowing easy replace/upgrades if you screw things up. Customizing the system with apt-get or synaptic, while it may work (I don’t remember it working that well last time I tried), loses those advantages.
It also loses the advantages of the no-ram needed UCI extentions that they have set up, which is perfect for older systems.
Yup, DSL is based on Debian but it’s not fully compatible with Debian — that has never been a goal for DSL. The actual goal of DSL is to keep the RAM usage as low as possible to make DSL useful on old hardware.
There’s a project called “Debian Live” http://live.debian.net/ (still in an early phase of development) that should make it easy, some time in the future, to build your own customized live-cd that’s fully Debian compatible.
Sorry, its not quite that simple. I just tried. What should work is: update to the gnu utils, then enable apt, then synaptic, and you should be able to install debian packages. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment whichever entries you would like to use, then from the terminal as root do apt-get update. The just use synaptic to select and install your packages.
However, on dsl 2.4 what happens if you try this is you cannot install synaptic, the sources come up with error 404, and you get in a loop which requires dangerous and drastic measures… Other apt-get installs also encounter strange error conditions.
So, best advice might be, if not wanting to hack around for quite a bit, wait for 2.5 and maybe they will have fixed it!