'Damn Small Linux' is Back - But Bigger (itsfoss.com) 100
Back in 2006 Slashdot reported on a 50-megabyte "micro" distro called Damn Small Linux. (And in 2012 we wrote that it "rose from the dead" with a new release candidate.)
Now Damn Small Linux has been reborn again, according to its developer's web site: Creating the original DSL, a versatile 50MB distribution, was a lot of fun and one of the things I am most proud of as a personal accomplishment. However, as a concept, it was in the right place at the right time, and the computer industry has changed a lot since then. While it would be possible to make a bootable Xwindows 50MB distribution today, it would be missing many drivers and have only a handful of very rudimentary applications. People would find such a distribution a fun toy or something to build upon, but it would not be usable for the average computer user out of the gate....
The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD, or a hard limit of 700MB. This project is meant to service older computers and have them continue to be useful far into the future. Such a notion sits well with my values. I think of this project as my way of keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills.
As with most things in the GNU/Linux community, this project continues to stand on the shoulders of giants. I am just one guy without a CS degree, so for now, this project is based on antiX 23 i386... a fantastic distribution that I think shares much of the same spirit as the original DSL project. AntiX shares pedigree with MEPIS and also leans heavily on the geniuses at Debian.
The blog It's FOSS News describes it as "a unique experience in a sea of Debian-based and Fedora-based distros." It is offered with two window managers, Fluxbox and JWM, with apt being fully enabled by default for easy package installations... At the time of writing, only the Alpha ISOs were made available on the official downloads page. It is only a matter of time before we get a stable release.
Now Damn Small Linux has been reborn again, according to its developer's web site: Creating the original DSL, a versatile 50MB distribution, was a lot of fun and one of the things I am most proud of as a personal accomplishment. However, as a concept, it was in the right place at the right time, and the computer industry has changed a lot since then. While it would be possible to make a bootable Xwindows 50MB distribution today, it would be missing many drivers and have only a handful of very rudimentary applications. People would find such a distribution a fun toy or something to build upon, but it would not be usable for the average computer user out of the gate....
The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD, or a hard limit of 700MB. This project is meant to service older computers and have them continue to be useful far into the future. Such a notion sits well with my values. I think of this project as my way of keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills.
As with most things in the GNU/Linux community, this project continues to stand on the shoulders of giants. I am just one guy without a CS degree, so for now, this project is based on antiX 23 i386... a fantastic distribution that I think shares much of the same spirit as the original DSL project. AntiX shares pedigree with MEPIS and also leans heavily on the geniuses at Debian.
The blog It's FOSS News describes it as "a unique experience in a sea of Debian-based and Fedora-based distros." It is offered with two window managers, Fluxbox and JWM, with apt being fully enabled by default for easy package installations... At the time of writing, only the Alpha ISOs were made available on the official downloads page. It is only a matter of time before we get a stable release.
All well and good but.... (Score:5, Funny)
..will it run on my toothbrush? Asking for a friend...
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..will it run on my toothbrush? Asking for a friend...
Only a particular swiss domestic brand.
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Honestly, I wish that story were true for various reasons... but apparently it didn't actually happen [tomshardware.com].
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The latest update says that the "didnt actually happen" line is actually false itself.
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50MB is like one tenth (Score:5, Interesting)
of a single basic Electron app or appimage distribution
The day of coding tight code and taking time to manage dependencies properly are long gone. So yeah, it had to become bigger.
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I take your point, but since I was just doing some (basic, granted) video editing using AVIDEMUX, whose APPIMAGE is "44.9ÂMB (44,945,384 bytes)" ... you may be over pudding the egg a bit. Clearly, by your standards, some people can still do reasonably "tight" coding.
Personally (never having done one of these "multiple source code file" applications), I suspect that people alternate between "feature development" and "feature
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No, I don't expect SlashMinions to reply. Or even notice.
Oh Boy! (Score:3)
Yet *another* Linux distro! I can't wait to try it after I've tried all the other (checks DistroWatch...) 100+ distros that are out there that need my time and attention.
Seriously gang, there are so many distros out there that aim to be "lightweight" and "designed for older computers" but let's be honest with ourselves shall we? How many core 2 duo systems are still in *active* use out there? There is a shelf life on old hardware and I suspect much is already in landfills.
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There's a ton of C2D laptops still around in the used market, I see them pretty regularly. These machines typically have optical drives and while they are right on the line between trash and worth using, they could really help some people who currently have no computer.
OTOH I literally scrapped a Lenovo SFF C2D not too long ago because who cares. It wasn't a super tiny one, but it was small enough to have short expansion cards and those are annoying. It only had 4GB onboard, and I don't think it was expanda
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Boot and run off of floppy with room to save files (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet *another* Linux distro! I can't wait to try it after I've tried all the other ...
How many of the others can you boot and run off of a floppy diskette and still have room to save your files? :-)
How many core 2 duo systems are still in *active* use out there?
The point of such a distro can also be small and more secure virtual machines. Fewer things to attack and exploit. I've worked on projects that were even smaller. Servers with just the core kernel functionality that the application needed, drivers only for the hardware it was running on, very little from userland and absolutely no development tools.
Re:Boot and run off of floppy with room to save fi (Score:4, Informative)
I'd be sceptical that you could boot and run DSL off a floppy disk drive given that they only go up to about two and a bit megabytes.
Re:Boot and run off of floppy with room to save fi (Score:4, Informative)
if it can't produce a subset to do that then it isn't even in the running!
Tom's Root Boot, among others, is still around, and others are even smaller, which could leave file space on even a normally formatted 1.4.
Tom's was the one that I kept around for repairs in the days gone by.
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I haven't seen Toms R/B for ages. The last time I (seriously) looked at such things, I settled on Knoppix as my "un-fsck my fsck" option, and it hasn't let me down (16GB SD card, including a Knoppix partition and about 10GB of user-space partition. For, e.g. the next distro I want to try.)
But smaller? Another memory stick and SD card - diddy ones - holds "Petter's NTFS password de-fucker" I forget the proper name. But when you've go
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I'd be sceptical that you could boot and run DSL off a floppy disk drive given that they only go up to about two and a bit megabytes.
LOL. I had "small" in my mind and misread the size as 700K. How the f*ck could 700 meg be considered small? At best I'd say that is non-bloated. It will fill a CD.
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> only go up to about two and a bit megabytes
If you have a japanese floppy drive and japanese floppies
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Seen enough read errors to not rely on it though. I got a parallel-port ZIP drive instead. Saw the "click-of-death" occasionally, but if I kept the important stuff mirrored onto 2 discs, and the unimportant stuff ... well the ZIP was a copy of data at home, so "click-of-SHRUG".
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I dont fancy booting DSL off a floppy! I dont fancy writing 35 floppies either.
There are other floppy distros that use one or two floppies if you really need to.
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FWIW, when we "really needed" something for a high profile internet facing project, we built a custom kernel with nothing we did not need, only drivers our blades needed, and only enough userland to copy log files. And of course our server. Can't exploit what is not there.
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> I misread 700M as 700K, I took "small" too literally. An installer filling an entire CD isn't what I consider small.
Well this isnt an installer, but a whole live OS in 700MB. The thing is that having useful programs, with all sorts of new larger libraries, supporting modern hardware and protocols, more modern browsers that support HTML5 etc, coupled with the much larger size of the kernel these days maked 50MB way too lean.
To gain a true idea a simple comparison of the list of programs on an older 50M
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> I misread 700M as 700K, I took "small" too literally. An installer filling an entire CD isn't what I consider small.
Well this isnt an installer, but a whole live OS in 700MB.
That is what a I meant, a complete standalone installer, not a net installer.
The thing is that having useful programs
And that is where I expect bloat.
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I'm currently using a Dell Latitude E5500 with Devuan and Fluxbox to full satisfaction, and would have still used an even older HP/Compaq were it not that the replaced motherboard also began to fail.
Daily use can easily be done with a C2D or similar. The only minor issue is the Intel GPU, which can have trouble with larger 1080p movies.
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Hater.
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Re:Oh Boy! (Score:5, Interesting)
The other question is while it's great to keep old equipment out of landfills, is the tradeoff worth it considering how power hungry the older devices are?
Re:Oh Boy! (Score:5, Informative)
> is the tradeoff worth it considering how power hungry the older devices are
I was wondering the same thing.
Lets assume a woman gets an old laptop at a thrift shop for $10.
Using this [energy.gov] calculator, assuming 40W and 4 hours a day, the power costs about $10/yr.
If a new device is $300 but it only uses $5 a year in power, it'll take almost sixty years to reach break-even. More like 10 the way power costs are going up.
I'd think she'd be better off saving that money for other expenses.
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The old PowerPC MacBook Pros were pretty miserly in terms of power usage. But I expect this distro wouldn't run on one.
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New laptops frequently want 60W or more.
She'd get the power efficiency if she went for a chromebook, perhaps but even they ahve the hunger depending on model.
The Dell laptops here where I work are not happy with anything less than a 90W adapter, they typically pull 40W just running idle but want the extra headroom for number crunching and battery charging when demanded.
Whats changed is the watter per "performance" whatever that means. The old laptop, if used to write a document or two, will use the same am
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In addition:
The BIGGEST gains over older hardware however is in better power management. Devices and subsystems that can adjust clocks and sleep and wake quickly.
But in practice much of that is buggy, on paper suspend and resume should work if implemented properly however being a Linux user since 1998 it's clear that much of that is poorly implemented even today.
Basically a newer device will save power when it is not being used, at which point perhaps you should just, turn it off?
It all depends on the work
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One of the "I really don't give that much of a shit about this" moments for me, as I threw "desktops" over the side, was when driving the desktop's processor to 2*100% for 2~2.5 hours would force a re-boot ; but if I took the cover off, it would run for a full 4 hour re-encode. So .. do I want a 500W PSU with a solid reputation, or a "new PSU on the block" at 750W nominal?
Choices, choices.
I dropped desktops. More hassle than they're worth if you're away from h
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They dont use any more power than modern devices. Although we are excluding a Raspberry Pi as that clearly runs on nothing.
My old Risc PC, from 1993, running at 33MHz can be used to play old games, code, write documents etc. Draws about 30W, not much more than a modern low power laptop, and here where I work most of the laptops demand a 90W or bigger PSU and will complain about it if they dont get it.
My C64, an 8 bit machine, again useful for coding, agming and yes even some retro styled word processing, d
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You see back in my day there were two main uses of electricity. Lighting and heating. When I was a nipper in the 80's and 90's we had electric storage heaters that charged up on cheaper rate electric overnight, you didnt get the heat till the morning and by the time you were back from school the heat was mostly used up without you even being there. Single gazing too! Water condensed on the windows which had to be wiped away every morning. Cold? No, I wore jumpers.
Apart from most using gas central heatin
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A couple of days ago, talking about urban mine geothermal, I grabbed some numbers, 1865 building (with 2010 insulation between the stone and the plasterboard), 4degC outside air temperature ; 10degc ground temperature; fridge, file server and router running in the living room - 12 degC. 14degC after I'd been in the room for an hour.
100-odd W of "parasitic" power brings the room up to an acceptable temp
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but let's be honest with ourselves shall we? How many core 2 duo systems are still in *active* use out there?
Absolutely shedloads. Here in the UK it was the last large government purge of hardware. 2008-2012 IT disposal auctions were rammed full of thousands of ex-govt, ex-NHS, ex-corporate IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads and Dell Latitude/Inspiron desktops/laptops. My wife is still rocking a Thinkpad T60 from 2006 with a Core 2 Duo CPU, currently running Windows 10 quite well with 4, now 8GB RAM and a 480MB SATA SSD for web/office type stuff she does. She even does some CAD for signage with an older version of Photoshop and
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Yet *another* Linux distro!
Yet it's been around since 2005.
I can't wait to try it ...
You're a little late to the party. :-)
Everyone needs a hobby. :-)
Okay, maybe a therapist too. :-)
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The desktop I am on as I am typing this is at least a 14 year old AMD Quad core. Not a power house. But runs smooth and does what I need it to do. Browsing web, office tools, photo editing, listening to tunes, coding, and my 3d modelling and printing all work on it. Why do I need to upgrade when I can just get a lightweight distro for older computers? I can save my moolah for other toys that I really want and save the world from more ewaste?
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Core2 Duo? Who the hell has something that NEW?
There are still P1 and P2 systems in heavy use running non-networked scientific machines on DOS and Win95 out there. I still maintain a few of them.
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Well this isnt "yet another" distro as this distro came before the vast majority of the ones you have been looking at.
It's not new and the old versions are still used all over for older hardware and lighter usages.
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OK, I'm going to have to do some hardware research. My approximately 15 YO system (approx : I brought the laptop 2nd hand) is "Intel® Coreâ i5-2540M CPU @ 2.60GHz Ã-- 4 ", but I may have missed a hardware generation or three before deciding to completely shit-can desktops.
Nope - still uncertain. I think my system is in the middle of your target range of contempt, but I'm by no means sure. It's on the basis of the age that
What's the point? (Score:2)
Debian netinstaller is like 150 MiB. Increasing the size of DSL to 700 MiB sort of relegates it to a "me too" distro offering you no clear benefit.
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The Debian netinstaller (629M today by the way; you clearly haven't actually looked at it since DSL was 50M) is capable of just about nothing aside from booting and installing more stuff. I think there's a very clear benefit to a 700M distro that is actually useful on first boot without a network connection, especially one that targets PCs even Debian would classify as "garbage" these days.
Re: What's the point? (Score:2)
I actually just did a Google search yesterday. It says 180MiB. But the info was dated.
I actually have booted up a netinstall Debian system in the last month. It was perfectly usable.
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However, I've been installing devuan-netinstall on various laptops and find it excellent, in the minimal sense. (no systemd, I use sysvinit) I didn't check the installed footprint, it's probably larger than you would want for embeded applications, but it's very small and very very fast on a recent model machine...
Note, I'm into "core functionality" --- for the desktop, so after you install a browser lik
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> It was perfectly usable.
As a minimal X11 Desktop?
That's what DSL is.
Re: What's the point? (Score:2)
Yes.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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FWIW I find puppy linux (a sub 500M distro) a fine replacement for Win95 on older laptops - works fine on my old Sony Vaio PCG-C1 subnote, which I bought in 1999 or thereabouts.
Kinda like my old 1966 mg roadster, it is nice to start a few times every year, just to remember the good old days.
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more efficient software can easily compensate (even over-compensate) for more powerful hardware
Yep. The first lesson in any class on algorithms is usually that brute force is the worst approach to solving a problem, along with many examples of why it is often futile.
Yet we're at a point where nuclear-powered brute force is not a joke, but a shiny bandwagon spending trillions on which is something promoted by people who ought to know better.
What an irony.
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As I understand it, brute force is to try any possibility for a known problem where much better options are possible.
Yes. Or, for an unknown problem where there is poor understanding of what it is that one is trying to solve.
For example, trying to "train" a model on all possible combinations of words in a language that someone has written in the past in the hope that it will cope with the living language.
Or, as another example, try to "train" a "neural net" on a very large set of simulated particle events in the hope that it will compensate an inadequate detector.
Or, as a third, applying an LLM to do what the neural netwo
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Don't try that with a modern car. You'll run the battery totally flat. And Pb-Acid batteries don't like going flat. Newer "gel" and "smart-start" batteries like it even less - a few minutes of being flat can fuck (permanently) the battery.
If you're not going to drive it at least once a week, disconnect the battery. You'll lose the alarm, but you didn't expect that to come (electrically) for fr
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Of course. Actually, I try to get out all cars at least once a month for a drive, even a short one, leaving them in one place for too long causes other things to also get stuck or fall apart in various ways.
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Is it more efficent? Since it uses apt, it appears just to be a stripped down debian install.
This is still nice if you have a small harddrive and don't want to go through the trouble of deciding what you want to install.
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Re:At first sight, it seems a good direction (Score:4, Informative)
> Since it uses apt, it appears just to be a stripped down debian install.
All Debian distros use apt, but not all apt distros derive from Debian.
Apt doesn't require any particular set of packages.
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Interesting. I wasn't aware of non-debian distros using apt. Thank you
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Well, there's different kinds of efficiency. I'd argue a lot of the problems with Windows Vista were attempting to shoehorn an ambitious redesign of Windows onto machines that didn't quite have the performance yet -- the same with Windows NT 4 back in the day and memory. Sure overoptimizing those products made them more CPU or RAM "efficient", but it was a huge waste of human time for users and administrators. That wasn't a problem for Microsoft though, and as long people paid willingly, you can't critici
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I'd argue a lot of the problems with Windows Vista were attempting to shoehorn an ambitious redesign of Windows onto machines that didn't quite have the performance yet
And you would be wrong.
Sure overoptimizing those products made them more CPU or RAM "efficient", but it was a huge waste of human time for users and administrators.
Uh no, what they did in Vista was underoptimize. Windows 7 is a barely warmed over rerelease of Windows Vista. It has, by and large, the same UI and services. However, while Vista is a dog even on a system with 2GB RAM, Windows 7 runs OK on 512MB. You can literally upgrade a system which came with Vista and ran like shit to Windows 7 and have it work well, despite (once again) Vista and 7 basically being the same OS, only Windows 7 has had more optimization and yet has a few more feat
Top down embedded? (Score:2)
DSL strikes me as a desktop more than you'd want for an embedded project. I know a lot of embedded with go "bottom up" with things like bootroot, but then you've got to think about lots of mundane things that the system usually does for you. Going "the other way" from a full running system to a minimalist locked-down one is an awful experience if you've got systemd to contend with, and still difficult even if you start with a sysv-init system. DSL seems like a nicer starting point than (say) debian, althoug
I used DSL heavily back in the day... (Score:3)
Not to rescue machines from the landfill, but for network simulations.
If you wanted to simulate a swarm of REAL machines hiting a server, there was nothing better. Also for a pre-packaged simulation for students/customers to tinker with an App.
I also used AntiX (for a PiHole VM), so, this "remix" piques my interest. If they can make a "friendlier" AntiX, that will be grand!
But bigger? (Score:1)
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I found that "But Bigger" part amusing. So, were we to expect it came back and be UNDER 50mb?
I thought people were mostly using BusyBox or (Score:2)
Alpine at this point. I've never used Alpine but I have used busybox for a long time.
Eh (Score:3)
If I need an OS with a small footprint it’s NetBSD.
NitrOS9 is Much Smaller - 1MB (Score:3)
https://github.com/n6il/nitros... [github.com]
Why? (Score:2)
In a world where everybody has a cell phone, what's the use case for reviving shitty 15 year old laptops?
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In a world where everybody has a cell phone, what's the use case for reviving shitty 15 year old laptops?
bigger screen, keyboard and mouse (i.e. better ergonomics) than a phone. Even if the only purpose of the distro is to run a client to RDP to your phone, that's still a win, as it keeps an old laptop out of the landfill, and is one less "thin client" manufactured, wasting raw materials, to connect to your samsung Dex , Android desktop mone (Android 11 and up) or whathaveyou...
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How on earth does a cell phone replace a real computer??
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If you need a real computer, you don't use a museum piece.
Sure, once upon a time, people needed a computer just for basic internet access. Anything was fine. But for basic internetting today, cell phones are fine or maybe even superior.
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More people have cellphones and (this is important) do not trust them. Particularly for important transactions.
My bet is - you're going to get hacked before I do.
Linux Router Project (Score:2)
There was an excellent Linux Router Project [wikipedia.org] active around 2000, which ran on commodity PCs, booting from a floppy, running in RAM, no hard drive needed. For less than $50 (an old x86 box that someone would pay you to take off their hands, and maybe one or two ethernet cards) you could set up something that outperformed commercial routers that cost far more. I happily had a machine serving as my home router (named Wheezer after its somewhat noisy fan) for years but then it became common for wireless acces
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Kids these days... (Score:3)
Kids these days think DSL is small, they think 700 MB is small. You have it easy! In my time, all we had was tomsrtbt (a full Linux distro on one 1.44 MB floppy [remember those, kidos?])!
QNX Neutrino demo? (Score:3)
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yep! At some point there was a version that would boot on x86, cuz I tried it and was pretty blown away. I still think about that sometimes.
Nice to see the DSL project reactivated (Score:2)
Very nice to see DSL restarting as a project. Back in the day I used it a lot. It was quite easy to roll your own version of it. I did that quite a lot. There was a very nice feature which I think was called frugal install. This allowed you to install it to HD and boot in a similar way as the CD or USB stick would boot. So effectively boot from a read-only filesystem. For instance interesting for some system used in a public setting where it is an important feature that after a reboot it is 'clean' again. A
more context - Knoppix roots (Score:2)
Knoppix has abandoned the CDROM scale and is exclusively a DVD img release now.
people don't burn discs these days, go usb stick (Score:1)
Instead of focusing on a disc size, why not just make an image that can fit on 1GB usb bootable stick? Everyone has old stick lying around, that image can always fit on bigger ones, and 1GB a good size to give away cheaply, can buy a pile of them for cheap.
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And what do you do if your system has:
A: No USB ports or no bootable USB support
B: No DVD ROM drive to read your 1GB ISO off a DVD-R
See the point here is to be able to boot DSL on a CDROM machine with no USB boot capabilities.
Thats what DSL is for.
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> can buy a pile of them for cheap.
No you cant, compared to the cost of a CD-R they are insanely expensive for what they are. Heck, a DVD-R is 4x the size of a 1GB flash drive and costs only £0.33.
Also, flash drives are unable to be read only, really old "feature rich" ones that have a proper write protect switch can do the job but the write protection feature of flash controllers was dropped long ago. Now if you want such basic functionality you have to pay extra for a premium flash drive that h
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bleah bleah bleah average PC haven't even included disc for a long time.
People don't burn discs, you're an outlier and a weirdo. The disc is dead.
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I only mentioned the 1GB because everyone has those little things like that or 2GB or 4GB are lying around and years old.
A 64GB stick is $7, what does that do to your little argument? Destroys it is what.
Computers don't even have optical drives any more, maybe you didn't notice. Raspberry PI and similar don't, thin client for cute little servers don't.
What they have had is USB ports for 28 years. That's the way, not your discs that only weirdos use now.
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Oh, you mean some system like 99.999% of people don't have? PC have had USB ports for 28 years.
I buy $25 thin clients and make little servers out of them, they don't have disc drives. Neither do Raspberry PI and similar. Neither does typical laptop or PC any more.
The world has changed, get with the program, Elmer.
Very nice (Score:2)
A hard limit of 700MB is just the ticket.
Although most of my machines at home and work will happily read a DVD-R, I dont need to boot a 4GB distro to run some tests or wipe a HDD etc. I've been making do with SystemRescueCD, or using a shell in clonezilla to run a smart test etc.
Does anyone remember the QNX Demo Floppy Disk? (Score:2)