Damn Small Linux is a Linux distribution based on the Knoppix live CD, but reduced enough to fit on a 50MB business-card shape CD. Damn Small Linux is a general purpose distribution to carry around in one’s wallet; it comes with XFree86 and the Fluxbox window manager, while other light-weight applications for email, web browsing, word processing, instant messaging and playing music are also included. Read an interview with the author of Damn Small Linux – John Andrews.
50megs huh… very impressive. I wonder if Dillo would be a better browser for it though. 404kb installed, and it’s the fastest browser i’ve ever used. Of course… it doesn’t do CSS, or anything fancy, but by the looks of it, nor does the browser he’s using.
I wonder how much of that CD XF86 is taking (/usr/X11R6 is 75MB on this box).
Does anyone know if there is a Live CD out there that would automatically setup routing tables so that i could do DHCP/NAT with a box? My NAT box went away for a few weeks
This sounds nice, I’ll have to download it. Does anyone know of a LiveCD that uses Gnome2.2 as the DE?
You can download a Morphix iso that uses Gnome 2.2
http://morphix.sourceforge.net/modules/news/
Also, GNOPPIX uses Gnome. Not sure of the version though.
http://www.gnoppic.org seems to be down.
actaully it uses: Kdrive Xvesa and Xfbdev servers(from the website http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/), and not Xfree86 if I undestand it correctly, they are probably much smaller.
I am using DSL right now. I downloaded, burned a CD, and rebooted. I always wanted to try fluxbox. I really like the simplicity of fluxbox. The interface is clean and uses popup menus. The browser included gLinks is also very clean. I wish this was the way that GUIs were heading instead of flashy overload.
liked it so much, i ran the little program that copies it to a linux drive and makes it bootable (under VirtualPC on my Mac of course). I actually only used it because it was a small quick and painless install so I could try out XPde.
how do I tell fluxbox to display desktop-icons?
I have 8cm CDs and I really hate to see the space go to waste
anything that is 180MB, live CD, and has a few more utils ?
I am sure my school’s computer labs will be thrilled to see me run linuxx hehehehehe
You’re looking for Knoppix then…
http://www.knoppix.org/
Why don’t you remaster the original Knoppix, get rid of the stuff you don’t need and fit the rest into 8cm disc. It’s easier than you think, and there is plenty of tutorials explaining Knoppix remastering.
Have fun and maybe publish your work.
I’m serious. I remastered Knoppix to my needs when I was to present my BS thesis, which was a Jabber client for Linux. It worked great.
You should check out the gibraltar distro
http://www.gibraltar.at/index.php?home_eng
or clarckConnect
http://www.clarkconnect.org/
I was just a few years ago, I tried another OS that would do the same things. The one difference was that it booted off of a single FLOPPY! Yes, that included the windowing system and the applications. No, I can’t remember what it was.
How the world has changed in just a few years. Now, we consider 50MBto be Damn Small.
The Light-GUI morphix (http://www.morphix.org) is supposed to fit on a 8cm CD. It has XFCE4 as DE and Abiword as word processor. I like it a lot.
Don’t worry. It’ll be bigger next year.
BTW This form-factor in a R/W cartridge would have made an excellent floppy replacement.
Also LiveCDs are a ‘killer app’. I’ll let everyone’s imagination wander with all the things you can do with one.
how do I tell fluxbox to display desktop-icons?
You Can’t. You will need a file manager to do that. You may want to add gmc to your .xinitrc file. (I don’t know if gmc comes with this disto.) Also, you could use nautilus but then you would have a damn bloated linux
qnx is what you are thinking of, it will run from floppy.
http://www.qnx.com
Is Linux now at this point bloated that stretching it down to 50Mb is considered an amazing accomplishment ?
Jeez …
Here is a partial list of firewalls that boot from a cd :
Astaro Security Linux 4.008
Clark Connect 2.0
Closed BSD 1.0
Dachstein 1.0.2
EnGarde Secure Linux 1.3.0
IP Cop 1.3.0
M0n0wall public beta 11 release 4.0.1 (written with zeros, not the letter o)
NetBoz 1.4 beta 8
OpenWall 1.0
SecurePoint 3.1.3
Sentry Firewall 1.4.0
Smoothwall 2.0 beta 4
Trustix 2.0
The few of them I’ve tried don’t automatically setup routing tables. You have to break a sweat for that (a tiny one, though).
Perhaps he did not use dillo because it needs gtk+ installed. It also needs libjpeg and libpng, but hacked-links probably uses them too.
RE: “50MB is “damn small”?”
It must have been the QNX demo floppy. Uber cool. Uber small.
RE: RE: desktop-icons +
From the dammsmalllinux site….
“Now in 0.4.3 we have desktop icons! This is possible because of the fantastically small XtDesktop X Windows desktop icon manager by Dmitry Ovechkin.”
Sorry for all the ‘RE:’s, I am interested in little distros for a load of old boxes here, so I have to research!
Well, I reackon you can still fit linux and network+sound support+framebuffer support on a floppy with room to spare.
Making it suit a range of machines requiring many different drivers, and also providing some useful apps takes a bit more space.
Linux (with X, etc) can run from a floppy, see:
http://www.angelfire.com/linux/floorzat/2diskXwin.htm
Yes it is very possible, and theer are a few ways::
FBDesk
iDesk
So what? I’m not impressed considering that QNX can fit an OS, GUI, and networking stack including dialup onto a 1.44 Mb floppy.
We had this discussion already. Yes some OSes are small. I have a 400k floppy with a GUI OS, a word processor, and an Illustration program. I would boot off of the floppy run the programs and save my documents to it. Who cares. I like the fact that DSL tries to be small and useful. Can anyone discuss different OSes without this becoming a pissing contest?
I’m impressed. I tried to install a few different lightweight distro’s for my new “old, used” laptop I got, and most of them were either too bloated or too unuseable to be any good to me. This meets my needs perfectly for speed and usefulness.
50mb is not tiny like the QNX demo disk was, but this thing has a helluva lot more going for it than the QNX demo disk. Think about it…
-Flecko
I don’t believe the QNX demo disk is available for download anymore…unless someone knows otherwise…
Check http://www.tinyapps.org
I think they mirror it still.
-Flecko
“50mb is not tiny like the QNX demo disk was, but this thing has a helluva lot more going for it than the QNX demo disk. Think about it…”
If I am really careful about what I install, I can make Windows 98 fit into less than 50 Mb… So much for Linux not being bloated…
“Can anyone discuss different OSes without this becoming a pissing contest?”
It’s not a pissing contest. But this is hardly news worthy. A Linux distro that fits in 50 Mb. So what? It’s not news worthy.
Linux **can** live on a single floppy. Try getting win98 and 200+ apps into 50MB and have it from from a CD.
I downloaded and burned the latest version. It runs fine.
Setup is not automatic. Graphics are adequate, but not
customizable to my 1280×768 screen. The X based files
manager is OK, but Midnight Commander is better.
One purpose for a live CD is backups. Here it falls down.
There doesn’t appear to be USB support for external
devices.
Yes it is. No it is not. Yes it is. No it is not.
That is how I define pissing contest.
No you don,t.
Yes I do.
No you don’t.
Can we just discuss the distribution and forget that it is small or not small. I liked it because I was able to download it, burn a cd boot it up, play with fluxbox, get on the web and have fun without having any problems. I like the fact that it is small (not as small as the 400k disk that no one cared to comment about, but small for being useful to me.) and does not feel bloated. As I said before I wish that all OSes were headed in this direction.
“Linux **can** live on a single floppy. Try getting win98 and 200+ apps into 50MB and have it from from a CD.”
Easily doable considering the kind of apps you are talking about. io.sys, msdos.sys, command.com I still got about 1.2Mb left for whatever apps I want to install.
It was excellent, but Firebird kept crashing on me.
Mini-mini review:
The boot was trouble free, it found my graphics,network,sound cards without intervention.
The default monitor timings and resolution were a little high for my old 14″ monitor during boot, but once the OS has booted, you are given the choice of FB-dev or SVGA based display. I chose svga, as it menu noted that it’s faster.
After that, the resolution and refresh were fine.
The default fluxbox desktop is rather monochrome and dull. Changing the style and clicking on the ‘Enhance?’ menu option quickly sorted that out, and the desktop was soon littered with useful icons.
The default browser, glinks-hacked is a new one for me. I’ts not as pretty or as user friendly as dillo. It has a couple of features that dillo lacks though: tabbed browsing, much more configuration without editing config files, and proper bookmark editing, and a better wget based download manager. It also appeared to render some pages better. Speed was about the same (both are very fast on a pentium 200). Still, Dillo somehow feels better on the same machine.
Nedit is the main text editor, another app I have not used, but I liked it instantly. It’s clean, fast and supports C highlighting. What more could you need?
If you have not tried this editor and dislike both Vi and Emacs as much as I do, give it a go!
Network configuration is primitive. If you don’t use dhcpc on your network then it’s command line time to set up ip, gateway, dns etc. I’ve done this up many times, but it’s still easier to use a gui, as just forgetting a ‘-‘ while setting the default route did nasty things to my firewall box!
To see what running a no hd system would be like, I did not enable a swap file. This computer has 64mb of ram, and top showed 60mb used with about 28mb cached. Starting a number of browsers, Nedit and xpaints did not seem to cause any problems or slowdown.
Overall, I’m a fan. Sure you could add Mozilla, Gcc, Mplayer, and a host of other useful apps, but that would be to miss the point. Here, a careful choice of apps to fit the available space plus the stability of the knoppix/Debian base make a great little distro.
Knoppix/Debian with the WOLK kernel is good stuff. Morphix wasn’t that great. The Heavy/GUI version has some problems. As for the light version I’m not a giant fan of IceWM. Can’t wait to try this distro out 🙂 Good work John.
FYI Morphix Light GUI is now based on XFCE4 not IceWM.
Hi, Cheezwog, thanks for the review. I’m also one of those who consider vi and emacs to be “stinking abominations from the bottommost pits of hell” 🙂
More seriously, I’d like to know if anyone has ever tried Damn Small Linux on an old laptop. I’m asking before I go buy a 166 MHz old clunker that’s on sale at the nearest pawn shop.
While it is cool, was it really that long ago when I installed Linux on my old (few year old at the time) 50Mb hard disk?
I guess so…
I feel old.
I just downloaded this distro to try it out for the first time. I was very impressed by it. So much so I permanently installed it on my old amd k6-2 300mhz 256 mb of ram and 2.5 gig hd. I know I can put say debian or some other linux on this setup. But I wanted to something small and quick and simple. This old workhouse is just there as a test bed ( I know I got to get a more modern testbed). I have friends that come over that do not have dsl/cable access and check there email and surf for a bit. And this distro is quick and easy to use. You can install firebird and flash with a click of a mouse its really nice on the net. I am so impressed I may send the $ to support this effort. For anyone out there with similar or slower hardware and just want it to be quick and easy to install and fast to boot up and basically be a surfing computer. This distro has that and much much more. I highly recommend this distro. My only gripe is with myself for not trying it early. Go get Damn small Linux its great! Kudos to the author and knoppix.
Ok, “Anonymous”, I’ll bite. What OS was it that was 400k and ran off a floppy
This distro has a new release almost weekly. I hope Andrews doesn’t end up putting so much stuff in his distro that it won’t fit in a 50 MB CD anymore.
This distro has a new release almost weekly. I hope Andrews doesn’t end up putting so much stuff in his distro that it won’t fit in a 50 MB CD anymore.
I doubt it. He finds smaller and more efficient programs, strips some binaries and generally finds ways to fit more into less space.
A very useful live linux that happily lives in your wallet. 8^)
if only Knoppix or any other live cd (other than the suse one) could actually work on my machine – I’d love to give these a try.
Unfortunately it tries to boot from cd, then “fails to find Operating system”- as if it’s “lost” the dvd drive half way through.
The idea is great though, Damn small linux also means of course that it will take substantially less time to boot right?
if so please let me know, i’d love to try it
cheers
anyweb
From the DSL site:
HowTo modify DSL to work on a USB Memory Stick
http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/
Yes, Windows 98 can get vey small. Certainly in the same range that we are talking about here. However, it wouldn’t last 10 seconds in the ring with a 50MB Linux OS.
Windows 98, once that small, it does nothing but basically turn on. As a full blown OS it is so utterly thin that to really use it for anything noteworthy you’ld have to install more apps. So much for being 50MB!
What’s the name of that wonderfully light yet full-featured firewall that comes with Windows 98? There isn’t one! How well does it network? It is a poor performer in this category. How stable is it? AKK!
We all know that Windows 98 was horrible in those areas. If you want any acceptable performance from Windows in those areas, you need to step into Windows XP, and that ain’t fittin’ on nothing 50MB in size!
I took Windows 98 off of my old laptop and installed linux using XFce4.
http://students.oamk.fi/~olilju00/xfce4/rc2/XFce4_on_Suse_HOWTO
Once I had a GUI that was light on resources it was just a matter of picking some packages to meet my needs. Yuo would have to select commercial apps much larger in size to even get that functionality.
My experinece with Windows is that the more packages that you install on it, the more the registry gets loaded down, the poorer it performs.
While this may open a can of worms, the above-mentioned statements are true! I am not trying to start a flame war, but just answer me, what tricks can a 50 MB Windows system do?
The GUI OS that ran off a 400k floppy and also included a word processor and a Paint program on the floppy was the First MacOS that was released in 1984. The machine only had 400k floppy drive with no hard drive. My point was that it doesn’t really matter how small the OS is if it is not useful. In 1984 I was amazed at what I could do with the computer. Now I want to do more and that is why it doesn’t matter how small the distribution is only that it allows one to do work. I like DSL because it feels almost refreashing to use because it is so lean.
There is a software called Smart Boot Manager that allows the user to select the device from which to boot the OS. A convenient version (a floppy image) is found on Debian Woody CD 1 (among other tools such as fips). It’s named sbm.bin; write it to a floppy (don’t write-protect it), put it in the drive and when the computer boots, follow the on-screen instructions. I’ve heard about it on a Debian forum but have never used it myself. I hope it helps you.
Damn Small Linux. Isn’t that an oxymoron? ;-D
I have a floppy that boots DOS and runs WordPerfect 5.1, with room left over for two book manuscripts, substantial parts of which I wrote using the floppy. I’ve been using it since about 1992 (the disk contents, not the disk itself!), and still pull it out when I’m away from my own computer and need to write.
Damn Small Linux is great — I played around with it for about a week, and I’m very impressed by how much got onto that business card disk. Still, fifty percent of the time, it’s fifty times more than I need . . .
“While this may open a can of worms, the above-mentioned statements are true! I am not trying to start a flame war, but just answer me, what tricks can a 50 MB Windows system do?”
Surf the internet. Do email. Write letters (I can install Abiword and still be under 50Mb), and yes, I can install a firewall and not go over 50Mb.
So what will a 50 MB Windows system do? More than a 50 Mb Linux system as far as the average user is concerned.
you could also use a nice utility called idesk
So what will a 50 MB Windows system do? More than a 50 Mb Linux system as far as the average user is concerned.
Ermmm …What exactly is your point?
The average windows user wouldn’t be able to use a feature packed biz-card sized live linux CD that runs on 99% of PCs / laptops and is carried in your wallet!?
I donwloaded Sdl linux and tried it out tonight. For someone who has tried a few linux distributions, but ended up saying in the end, “So, What next?”, this thing is pretty awesome. It was so easy and rather cool to try it out. I’ve got to read the notes on getting this on my hard drive next time.
“The average windows user wouldn’t be able to use a feature packed biz-card sized live linux CD that runs on 99% of PCs / laptops and is carried in your wallet!?”
No. My point was that it wasn’t news worthy. So what? Another Linux distribution to add to the existing 150 in just English alone. Another Linux distribution to create further fragmentation and frustrate software vendors even more. So what if it fits in 50Mb? That’s hardly a technical accomplishment.
No. My point was that it wasn’t news worthy. So what? Another Linux distribution to add to the existing 150 in just English alone. Another Linux distribution to create further fragmentation and frustrate software vendors even more. So what if it fits in 50Mb? That’s hardly a technical accomplishment.
You obviously don’t have any use for it, or more likely just don’t get it! <shrug!>
Btw It’s in the top ten distros at Distrowatch (covering last 4 weeks) 😉
“You obviously don’t have any use for it, or more likely just don’t get it! <shrug!>”
I do get it. Once again, so what is the big deal? I can create a 50 Mb live Linux CD in about 30 minutes that will run X Windows, etc. What’s the big deal?
And besides, Peanut Linux did this a long time ago anyway. Their distro was under 50Mb.
Once again, so what is the big deal? I can create a 50 Mb live Linux CD in about 30 minutes that will run X Windows, etc. What’s the big deal?
And besides, Peanut Linux did this a long time ago anyway. Their distro was under 50Mb.
Excellent – I’d love to try it out! Let me know where and when I can download your ideal <50m live linux CD.
Could you provide a link to the live Peanut linux CD?
Btw You do realise the discussion is about a GUIed, network aware, hardware detecting biz-card sized bootable linux CD that runs almost entirely in ram – don’t you?