tejas
15th May 2005, 03:42 PM
Its neither fedora nor any flavor of redhat, but I really thought that this awesome Debian Package deserved a review.
In case any of you have seen another thread of mine in the general support category, I was trying to install DSL from www.damnsmalllinux.org.
A little about the laptop: Beaten Up, IBM XD365, 16Mb RAM, 750 HDD, no USB, no Ethernet card. No sound card. I'm not sure about the speed, but I think it would be around 186 Hz.
Technically, DSL is an ultra modified version of Knoppix 3.2. It has a 2.4.26 kernel. It is definately not meant for newbies, unlike the original Knoppix due to many quicks. For example the man pages are not found on the system, instead they are linked to debian.org
The installation is by far the simplest I've ever seen, done within 5 minutes. Let me explain:
According to the DSL website, the way to install to HD is by the simple command
# dsl-hdinstall
There are two options, standard, and extended. Only standard worked for me as I was not connected to the internet. The installer formated my drive and created LILO for me. Please note, I am installing DSL as my primary distro on this laptop.
I noticed that DSL was really slow, and I realised that I had not created any swapspace. Creating swapspace was a real breaze using
fdisk
makeswap
swapon
I soon had DSL running at a fair speed, and I almost forgot I had a measly 16Mb Ram, as I made 128 swap.
Although DSL has multi user support, I didn't install it
While running from the CD I was not able to boot into X. I did the entire install procedure from single user mode. However, once installed on disk, X booted like a charm
The first thing that instantly bugs you as you load DSL is the lack of either KDE or GNOME. When you click the mouse and drag, you would expect to see a tiny rectangle form, but you won't. I guess it follows the standard X window way. Mounting and dismounting is really easy. You just have to click a little button on the panel in the bottom right and it is mounted. Clicking again unmounts the disk or floppy.
Although XMMS comes free with DSL, I didn't have a chance to test it out due to lack of soundcard. I will post about this once I have a chance to test out this on my fedora desktop. However, it does come with a large range of word processors and programs to manipulate excel files, so at the very least, I can use it as a dump for my word documents. I think the best feature is a counter at the bottom right of the screen [the panel] which shows % CPU time used, free memory and swap space. According to the website, you should be able to run an apache server off of DSL, and I wouldn't be suprised, granted the speed of the distro. It also seems to come with a CD writing program and a couple of other goodies, for example that stupid [although amusing] game where a cartoon cat chases your cursor till you shutdown
The entire install came to roughly 60Mb! This is about 10% of my HDD, and I'm wondering what to do with the rest. DSL seems to have no options for add ons except with synaptic, as Debian doesn't have RPMS. [Thank you RedHat]. However, I just want you guys to remember that this laptop was so old that it couldn't run windows 95, and the last time it had been turned on was in 1997. Considering all of that, I think That Damn Small Linux is the perfect solution for your computers that you thought were completely worthless. At the very least, you can use it as a cheap alternative for storing some non volatile backups.
And you have the satisfaction of telling people how you managed to install a complete distro on a computer that last saw Windows 3.1!
In case any of you have seen another thread of mine in the general support category, I was trying to install DSL from www.damnsmalllinux.org.
A little about the laptop: Beaten Up, IBM XD365, 16Mb RAM, 750 HDD, no USB, no Ethernet card. No sound card. I'm not sure about the speed, but I think it would be around 186 Hz.
Technically, DSL is an ultra modified version of Knoppix 3.2. It has a 2.4.26 kernel. It is definately not meant for newbies, unlike the original Knoppix due to many quicks. For example the man pages are not found on the system, instead they are linked to debian.org
The installation is by far the simplest I've ever seen, done within 5 minutes. Let me explain:
According to the DSL website, the way to install to HD is by the simple command
# dsl-hdinstall
There are two options, standard, and extended. Only standard worked for me as I was not connected to the internet. The installer formated my drive and created LILO for me. Please note, I am installing DSL as my primary distro on this laptop.
I noticed that DSL was really slow, and I realised that I had not created any swapspace. Creating swapspace was a real breaze using
fdisk
makeswap
swapon
I soon had DSL running at a fair speed, and I almost forgot I had a measly 16Mb Ram, as I made 128 swap.
Although DSL has multi user support, I didn't install it
While running from the CD I was not able to boot into X. I did the entire install procedure from single user mode. However, once installed on disk, X booted like a charm
The first thing that instantly bugs you as you load DSL is the lack of either KDE or GNOME. When you click the mouse and drag, you would expect to see a tiny rectangle form, but you won't. I guess it follows the standard X window way. Mounting and dismounting is really easy. You just have to click a little button on the panel in the bottom right and it is mounted. Clicking again unmounts the disk or floppy.
Although XMMS comes free with DSL, I didn't have a chance to test it out due to lack of soundcard. I will post about this once I have a chance to test out this on my fedora desktop. However, it does come with a large range of word processors and programs to manipulate excel files, so at the very least, I can use it as a dump for my word documents. I think the best feature is a counter at the bottom right of the screen [the panel] which shows % CPU time used, free memory and swap space. According to the website, you should be able to run an apache server off of DSL, and I wouldn't be suprised, granted the speed of the distro. It also seems to come with a CD writing program and a couple of other goodies, for example that stupid [although amusing] game where a cartoon cat chases your cursor till you shutdown
The entire install came to roughly 60Mb! This is about 10% of my HDD, and I'm wondering what to do with the rest. DSL seems to have no options for add ons except with synaptic, as Debian doesn't have RPMS. [Thank you RedHat]. However, I just want you guys to remember that this laptop was so old that it couldn't run windows 95, and the last time it had been turned on was in 1997. Considering all of that, I think That Damn Small Linux is the perfect solution for your computers that you thought were completely worthless. At the very least, you can use it as a cheap alternative for storing some non volatile backups.
And you have the satisfaction of telling people how you managed to install a complete distro on a computer that last saw Windows 3.1!
