"[...] entry on the application menu was spelled "brawsers", but fearlessly you dared it up.
Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap
Seventeen years after its last major version, an old favorite, Damn Small Linux, is back with a new 2024 release. An alpha-test version of a new release of Damn Small Linux appeared at the start of the month. The last major release, DSL 4, appeared in 2007, and the last point release, a development preview of DSL 4.11, was in …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 10:42 GMT keithpeter
Hardy Heron...
The desktop installation CD was a live ISO (although not hybrid I think). I recollect that the 5.0X Ubuntus had a live CD and an installer CD that were separate.
Ubuntu 6.06 and 8.04 both came with a Desktop, browser, photo viewer, GIMP, music player (no mp3 codecs then cos patents in US). GParted and some other tools. In Hardy network-manager was sufficiently functional to automatically configure the wifi for supported cards.
Good luck to this new-old DSL variant.
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 18:34 GMT Liam Proven
[Author here]
https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo
Enjoy.
Screenshot gallery:
http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
Adding extras:
https://openqnx.com/node/259
Adding features:
http://qnx.puslapiai.lt/qnxdemo/qnx_demo_disk.htm
Tools for working with it:
https://github.com/audiophyl/qnxdemotools
A tribute to its creator, the late Dan Hildebrand:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011106140711/http://www.qnx.com/demodisk/how.html
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 14:32 GMT John Robson
They should... the CD drive I was referring to is actually a CD/DVD writer, but it's IDE and on a shelf in the loft gathering dust.
I've probably got a couple of them in fact, but since there are now no (running) machines in the house which have an IDE port, it's not the easiest thing to get up and running.
Even something like DSL - I can't imagine there are many situations where a CD would be the choice boot media over a USB stick nowadays - if any...
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Sunday 18th February 2024 12:02 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
There are a few, but they're a bit specialist.
USB sticks generally take an ISO image anyway, but ISO images specifically are useful for workstation or server motherboards with network media redirection built in
There may be instances where you need to boot a system but don't want to have USB enabled.
The media redirection detailed above may require legacy USB support to be enabled, but legacy USB support can sometimes cause issues with PCI passthrough in virtualisation. I'd have to check if USB sticks themselves work without legacy support set to on.
I'll grant that actual physical media use has dropped to the point that 'DVD' and 'CD' images do not always fit on an actual DVD-R, and most of the time a USB stick, or a Zalman VE USB CD/DVD emulator is a better idea.
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Tuesday 20th February 2024 14:13 GMT John Robson
"There are a few, but they're a bit specialist."
I'm struggling to think of many - as you say it's far more typical to have a pxe boot, or a management interface system which takes an image and fakes a CD - but those generally don't care all that much about size.
I regularly boot machines that *think* they have a CD drive, but in reality they're just virtualised systems.
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Thursday 15th February 2024 11:57 GMT Bebu
Re: CD-ROM - no less
"I remember those but refuse to feel old."
I remember BSDI Unix for the i386 was available on CD-ROM or a shoebox or two 1.44Mb floppies and lusting after a cdrom drive which were at that time mostly scsi and expensive but then BSD/386 was something like USD995.00 back then (early 90s?) when you could still purchase proper operating systems. ;)
When your first PC was an XT compatible with Hercules mga and two 5.25" floppies, CD-ROMs seem positively modern.
Never occurred to me that my various notebooks and desktops with CD readers/writers actually had DVD drives not that most of them have ever been used.
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 11:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Cool, a new toy to fiddle about with.
I'm not sure that I can find a use for it.
For something small and (semi-)embedded, Tiny Core is brilliant.
For anything else, particularly if you're looking for something with a window manager/desktop interface, you'll almost certainly have the space for a more mainstream Linux
I fail to see the niche that DSL will fill these days. Possibly bootable recovery tools, but I haven't had to resort to one of those for a few years.
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 18:42 GMT Graham Cobb
Re: Cool, a new toy to fiddle about with.
I find myself resorting to bootable recovery tools more nowadays. Mainly because my "root disks" are now almost exclusively NVME and always die after about 18 months. Unlike rotating disks, when they die they seem to become completely useless with no warning at all (Btrfs DUP doesn't help because it looks like a whole chip dies) so I need to boot from a Ventoy stick to set up a temporary bootable partition on one of my rotating disks.
Which reminds me, will this new DSL boot from Ventoy? And is it usable as a live CD?
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Thursday 15th February 2024 10:19 GMT Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese
Re: Cool, a new toy to fiddle about with.
Older, still working, kit such as netbooks etc,
Indeed. I've got an old WinXP netbook kicking around, which I think I need to finally admit is at the end of its useful life, so may be a candidate for installing DSL on. I'm not convinced that I'll have a valid use case for it once it's installed, so would largely be doing it for the heck of it, but sometimes that's sufficient justification.
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Thursday 15th February 2024 20:29 GMT jake
Re: Cool, a new toy to fiddle about with.
I have a pile of old corporate laptops that are perfectly good. I give them away to people who need them. This kind of distro is a good option to include with them.
I'll also look at it as the supervisor for several ATMega328 controlled greenhouses.
Normally I use a cut-down variation of Slackware in these kind of rolls, but having a backup OS "just in case" is always prudent.
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 11:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Small?
My Osborne 1 ran CP/M-80:
- From a 192K floppy
- Using 64K of RAM
The CP/M OS occupied approximately 5K at the top of memory, leaving the rest for applications.
Of course, some applications (dBase-II comes to mind) needed more space than 59K, so dBase-II used overlays which were brought into an "overlay space" as needed.
Yup......now that really is small!!!!
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 11:26 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: Small?
Back in the day.... (a long time ago), you could configure an RT-11 kernel to run in 1.5kB.
We could run a full avionics simulator on a 56kB PDP-11 using RSX11-M with enough ram left over for other users to edit and do Fortran compilations.
Now we have simple apps using 200Mb just to get going. Madness.
I had to increase the Virtual memory of one app earlier today to 1.5Gb because it ran out of ram with 1Gb. More madness.
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Thursday 15th February 2024 10:33 GMT Sceptic Tank
Re: Small?
And I suppose your CP/M had a GUI on top of a multitasking OS kernel, access control, plug & play peripherals, and a network stack? I watch these 8-bit restoration channels on YT and all I can tell myself is how eternally grateful I am that the days of struggling with those clunkers are over.
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Thursday 15th February 2024 20:45 GMT jake
Re: Small?
On the other hand, consider that I can create and print a document using Wordstar or create and print a spreadsheet using Visicalc (both running on DOS 3.3) MUCH faster than I can perform the exact same task(s) using anything that Redmond is currently pushing. Using DESQview I can even run them simultaneously, side by side, with copy/paste between them possible, on just 4 megs of RAM.
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 12:22 GMT train_wreck
I run Alpine on my router, and the whole install of base environment with no GUI and various network daemons like nftables/DNS/DHCP/IPSec comes up to 390MB. I will say that Alpine has been a joy to use, and helpfully can operate with read-only root similar to Cisco IOS . I’ve been an Arch user since 2007 but they are far from being a small distro. One of the best parts of Alpine has been (rejoice!) no systemd!!
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 14:47 GMT CommonBloke
Here's one for SliTaz
Whose image is still hovering around 52MB, complete with a GUI. Once loaded from the LiveCD, you can eject it (or the USB stick) and everything will keep working. Too bad it sorely lacks built in network/wifi drivers, I've only ever got a working wifi on one computer, out of a dozen or so that I tried it on.
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 15:13 GMT Long John Silver
A trend to set?
I have fond memories of MS-DOS, CPM, and Torch's CPN. Each was obliged to be compact in order to work with limited RAM and simple processors. Optional bells and whistles had to be provided from elsewhere. Early MS Windows piggybacked on MS-DOS.
The various iterations of MS Windows (I know nothing of macOS) accumulated bloat; this may be its eventual undoing. The Linuxen started off slim. The Kernel, common apart from tweaks amongst Linux flavours, defines the OS. Everything else in a particular distribution is an add-on designed to serve well some category of Linux use and/or users.
Linux Kernels have increased in size considerably, but this seems in part a necessity for accommodating a huge variety of base hardware products. However, the developers have some choice over what goes into the core, and what might be relegated to distribution designers to incorporate, or not.
Early versions of openSUSE (perhaps other distributions also) contained a powerful text-based utility enabling relative novices such as I to tune and compile the kernel according to taste, e.g. for a particular specification of central processor. Thereby, kernel size was reduced, and perhaps more clearly targeted operation enhanced its efficiency. Obviously, devotees of the internal complexities of the OS can do this off their own bats.
Nowadays, most Linuxen are aimed at IT support technicians and/or at individual users, wishing to deploy them 'out of the box'. Fast central processors, cheaper RAM, and peripheral storage, rapidly accessible and potentially of enormous capacity, abound.
If Linux is to gain greater foothold amongst office workers and home users, then acceptance of bloating may be necessary. However, Linux, amongst major OSs, is unique because of (mainly) open-source development involving divers private enterprise and independent operators. Thus far, the kernel development team has maintained a good grip, and is not under commercial imperatives to rush through novelty whilst neglecting to trim legacy code. The worst outcome for Linux would be a pathway split in Kernel development resulting in incompatibilities, rendering it difficult for end-users to take software off the shelf.
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Thursday 15th February 2024 12:38 GMT Bebu
Re: A trend to set?
《Early versions of openSUSE (perhaps other distributions also) contained a powerful text-based utility enabling relative novices such as I to tune and compile the kernel according to taste, e.g. for a particular specification of central processor. Thereby, kernel size was reduced, and perhaps more clearly targeted operation enhanced its efficiency. Obviously, devotees of the internal complexities of the OS can do this off their own bats.》
I am surprised there isn't a tool for this. Boot a generic (everything + kitchen sink) kernel run something like Tru64's doconfig to configure and build as custom kernel tailored for your hardware as detected/probed by the generic kernel. You would probably also explicitly configure hot pluggable hardware that you might use.
Certainly in pre RHEL days I recall building minimal tailored Redhat 7.2 (2.4?) kernels without modules which I think also didn't require initrd support. Then hardware became cheap (both senses) and life is short. ;)
Perhaps future security concerns might lead to revisiting this.
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Thursday 15th February 2024 19:33 GMT Pete 2
Re: Moved on
> I really can't think of any features I use now which I didn't use then
Yes. Whenever I hear about a new release of anything: O/S's, apps, browsers ... anything, the only question I have is what will I be able to do, that I cannot already do?
And far too often the answer is nothing.
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 22:29 GMT jake
"Old versions of DSL could run with only 256 of ram"
If you go back far enough, Linux ran in 2megs of RAM, 4megs (at least) if you wanted to compile stuff for yourself, and 8 if you wanted Xwindows. It could be run from a single floppy drive, booting the kernel from one disk, and then swapping that out for the root file system.
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Thursday 15th February 2024 10:50 GMT Ian Johnston
I used to like DSL, so perhaps this will be a usefully shrunk version of AntiX which I have running on a couple of old Thinkpads but which is horribly slow to the point of unusable.
Bloat is a real problem in Linux. I used to run Lubuntu on an original EeePC (the woman on the beach one) with a 4GB SSD.
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Thursday 15th February 2024 11:00 GMT Geoff Campbell
What problem is this solving?
Yeah, I know, Bloat is Bad(tm). But I can put together a Raspberry Pi with a good fraction of a terabyte of fast storage for, I dunno, a bit over £100. I priced up a Pi5 with a 128GB of refurb'ed NVMe storage the other day when embroiled in a similar conversation, and it was significantly under £100, in fact - I think £89, but I might be misremembering the exact figure
It's nice to be able to keep really old hardware running, sure, I get that. But let's not pretend that it's a productive use of time. It's a hobby that is a fun way to waste some of a weekend, and if I'm reconditioning a twenty-year-old machine, I'll be using a contemporary OS on it, because I'm weird like that.
Anyway, go ahead, downvote me all you like. It's your own time you're wasting.
GJC
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Thursday 15th February 2024 17:43 GMT Grogan
Wow, that's nice news. That was an awesome little swiss army knife distro, I used to keep that handy. They even made it look nice, for being so light weight.
I found an old screenshot, I don't know the date but it's named dsl23.png, so version 2.3? It uses Linux 2.4. Using 23 Mb of RAM booted up with a decent GUI. I remember this being my favourite release, I loved the ringed planet and colour scheme. That's fake transparency though, it's the desktop bgimage. I positioned it so the rings match :-)
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Sunday 18th February 2024 13:11 GMT bernmeister
Small?
I had to double think here about the meaning of "damn small OS". Remember early systems? Just looking at Windows 3.1 requirements makes you wonder why we are so used to bloat that a 3.3G OS is called damn small. There is a real opportnity here for the development of a genuinly small OS with a friendly GUI and interfaces.