Damn Small Linux

[Fred Derf Veteran]

So I had my mom's old PIII-800, 192MB RAM notebook kicking around with a broken 20GB hard drive. Once upon a time it had XP on it. It's been collecting dust for a few months (years?) now and I was thinking of tossing the carcass.

I remembered that I had an old 512MB notebook hard drive that I pulled out of somebody's notebook when they needed more storage. It's been a while since notebooks were stored with 512MB hard drives but it too has just been collecting dust. It had some backup files on it from 2004 when I had been using it as a D: drive.

Anyway, I replaced the broken 20GB and installed the 512MB hard drive. I downloaded Damn Small Linux (a 50MB .ISO) which is based on Debian/Knoppix and proceeded to install it. A "full" installation took about 200-odd megabytes of the hard drive and I didn't bother creating a SWAP drive. The 192MB of RAM seems to give it a lot of room to play with. Firefox and the solitaire-type card games work fine.

I don't know if it still has any value. I suppose it is somewhat like a netbook except that it weighs 7 or 8 lbs (it's an IBM Thinkpad A21m). Still, Damn Small Linux was a pleasant experience and it makes me wonder how nice it would be on a real netbook. It would comfortably run on hard driveless models (the ones that use solid state flash memory for storage).

Anyway, it provided a distraction away from doing any real world for an hour or two.

[tsupersonic]

Yeah, it's Damn Small.

[markwolfe Veteran]

I like DSL. Threw it on an ancient 486 laptop, just to see if it booted. It did, but obviously things were painfully slow. :p

[MR_Candyman]

I love DSL. One of my 3 favorite distros (slackware, vectorlinux (slackware based) and damn small linux)

[Fred Derf Veteran]

DSL annoyed me. I started using the notebook more when my 21" monitor decided to kill itself. The 2.4 kernel was annoying and the best I could do for flash was Opera 9.64 with Flash 7. Javascript was promising to be an equal pain.

So I took a look at a few other distros but they all want to create ramdrives and with 192MB RAM, that just isn't practical. Any distro that doesn't want to create a ramdrive wants more than a GB of hard disk space (which I don't have).

I decided to reformat and install Debian-testing using the Netinst CD. Unfortunately you can't fit X11 onto a 512MB hard drive so I used a 1GB USB stick for the /usr mount.

Surprisingly, it works. I installed x.org/X11 and the lxde environment (the new default for Knoppix). I really, really, really like lxde. I also have Iceweasel (Firefox) 3.0.9 installed with Flash 10.

Filesystem			Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1			 486M  210M  250M  46% /
tmpfs				  94M	 0   94M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev				   10M  148K  9.9M   2% /dev
tmpfs				  94M	 0   94M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1			 684M  505M  144M  78% /usr

I also have a small swap space on /dev/sda1 (the rest of the 1GB stick).

[Barney T. Administrators]

^ +1

I use Debian Lenny x64 and ti is probably the best OS I've ever used. It is fast and has all of the software on it that I would ever want!