DSL (Damn Small Linux)

**excuzzzeme** · October 22nd, 2007, 02:23 AM

I came across something called DSL (Damn Small Linux).

http://damnsmalllinux.org/download.html

Said it is only 50MB and can be booted from flash drive. Has anyone tried this yet?

v

**jkrohn** · October 22nd, 2007, 02:32 AM

Been around for quite a long time.

I have never had the need to use it, but I imagine it would be quite useful in a rescue situation. IIRC the initial size was set so that it would fit on one of those business card CDs and you could just carry it around with you everywhere.

Jkrohn

**ShyguyXPC** · October 22nd, 2007, 09:27 AM

have little nix experience, but yeah, have a version of it burned on a mini cd somewhere, been using it for a couple years now(once in a great while, along with several other bootable CD type linux's) comes in handy every so often to boot a system & check if things work on it, especially if theres no hard drive in the PC.

**samwichse** · October 22nd, 2007, 10:49 AM

I've actually used it as the primary system on an old dell P2 233 mhz laptop.

Great little system, it comes with everything you need in ultra-stripped down form. It's about as resource intensive as windows 98 (it'll run well on 64 MB of RAM), but you get a modern kernel and USB features.

The one thing I would do if you install it to your HDD is run the Firefex downloader and installer. Dillo (the main, included browser) is nifty in that it's only 300kb, but it sucks pretty hard on rendering modern webpages (basically no CSS support). But dang is it fast.

EDIT: Whoops, I just realized I was talking about Puppy Linux, not DSL. I like puppy better.

**excuzzzeme** · October 22nd, 2007, 11:16 AM

My intent was to load it to my flash drive or as suggested a CC-CD (which I also have).
My flash drive is only 512 as I bought it years ago (and was expensive back then).

I was surprised that it could be so feature rich and yet as small as it is. Reminds me when Windows used to fit on floppies.

Thanks for the responses.

n

**KarmaKiller** · October 22nd, 2007, 11:53 AM

I just got it the other day to play with in Vmware. I think I'm going to try to install it on my IPOD!

Pretty handy for fixing older machines, also used it once on a old P3 system. Works pretty well, and as pointed out above, works great on little amounts of ram..

**Keymaker** · November 10th, 2007, 03:36 AM

I downloaded this a year ago, never did work. Maybe I have the wrong version. From the file tree, can someone just give the link to what I would need for x86?

There is something else similar to DSL called puppy Linux.

I leave fixing machines up to UBCD4win It has saved me a couple times.