Damn Small Linux

[drgoodtrips]

While only Dominick may appreciate this, I thought I'd throw it up here anyway. In light of some of the project work I'm doing at home, and because slackware has been giving me some headaches getting wireless internet/USB working properly (with older USB hubs off the monitor, plugging in a jump drive periodically causes the OS to completely lock up, which really, really sucks in terms of debugging), I went looking around at other lightweight Linux distributions.

I stumbled upon "Damn Small Linux (DSL)" which will install with as little as 8 Megabytes of RAM, 50 Megabtyes of hard drive space, and a 486 processor (we're talking 15+ year old computers) and run a modern OS with modern hardware. It loads the entire OS and application suite into memory and you actually don't need a hard drive. You can carry it around in your pocket on a thumb drive and run it on any computer you happen across, if you want. It also offers an embedded version, which I think I'm going to use as time goes on for the "dummy computers" that are to function as glorified browser boxes throughout my house for acting as the server.

I'll post any updates of interest on my experience, as I use it, for anyone who might be curious.

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

[drgoodtrips]

oh, "off the monitor" should read "off the motherboard"... :o

[drgoodtrips]

I've been poking around with this for a while, and it's really pretty impressive. It has word processing, a full firefox browser, various hardware support, the native capability to load Windows drivers, and even a handful of simple games (solitaire, minesweeper, etc). It also has an image of Tux you can use for the background. And, it's good as advertised with RAM - generally using around 20 Meg.

So far, one thing that takes getting used to is that you have to specifically configure it to write anything to disk. By default, nothing is saved after a reboot. And, I haven't quite gotten the wireless configured yet, but that's because I'm using WPA-PSK for encryption, and that is, apparently, pretty touch and go on any linux, and requires some know-how and tweaking. The USB works like a charm, and the OS recognizes the wireless dongle and I can see the available networks in the area (as an aside, if you want to crack other people's networks, Linux gives you a *lot* more info about them than Windows does... :D )