Quote:
Originally Posted by Dngrsone
I wish someone would bring Damn Small Linux into the modern age... I loved that little thing, but it won't run on any of my machines.
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The last I knew, DSL had sort of hit a wall. A key part of "small" was the the distribution ISO would not be larger than 50MB. It reached a point where nothing more could be added without bumping over the limit.
You might want to look at Tiny Core Linux, which has the same sort of model as DSL and Puppy: a Linux kernel and Busybox to provide the expected utilities, then add from there. See
http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/
IIRC, it's more modular than DSL: you start with the base system, then add what you want from their repo.
One issue with lower end hardware is apps. I have Puppy multibooting on a Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 notebook. It was a pass along from a friend, who had upgraded to a more powerful machine, but wanted the Lifebook to go to a new home, and not just get thrown out.
The Lifebook came with an 867mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU, a 30GB IDE HD, and a whopping 256MB RAM, of which the Crusoe CPU grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came from the friend with WinXP SP2, and was frozen snail slow. It took 8 minutes just to boot to XP, and longer than that to actually do anything. (XP wants 512MB RAM to even think about performing.)
I swapped the 30GB HD for a 40 from the SO's dead laptop, reformated and repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu, Puppy, and FreeDOS in a multiboot configuration. Win2K actually runs more or less acceptably in 240MB RAM. Puppy was straightforward. I tried Xubuntu, but it was slow, so I installed from the Minimal CD to get a working command line installation, then used apt-get to install Lxde and selected apps. It's not speedy, but does run. FreeDOS flies. :-)
Puppy's distro includes basic apps chosen for small size, so Puppy and it's bundled apps perform fairly well. Beyond that, things change fast. The big issue for me is the HD is IDE4, with low transfer rates. That's a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive isn't an option. I have Puppy and Ubuntu installed on ext4 file systems to take advantage of extents, which provides about 25% better throughput than other options, and each mounts the other's slice, so I can access files in the Linux distros form either OS. I found an open source Windows droiver that lets 2K read/write the ext4 filesystems. FreeDOS can only see its own FAT32 partition, but I don't care.
Slow HD speeds bite in Windows and Linux. Small apps load and run quickly. Big ones are another matter. For instance, I use Firefox as my production browser, but I don't even try to run a current version under Linux on the p2110. It takes 45 seconds to load, and is perceptibly slow once up.
The p2110 was mostly an experiment to see what sort of performance I could wring out of low end HW without spending money. I had low expectations going in and wasn't disappointed by the results.
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Dennis