31–40 of 185 posts
This was the only distro that I could fit on a memory stick, which were novel at the time (and memory was $$$ if you can believe that).
I stuck this into a machine I made from parts I found at our recycling center, and threw them in a shoebox.
Good times.
Also by using Musl and Alpine as a base the amount of software you can put in 700MB it's huge. With 700MB, IceWM and ZZZFM you could fit half a CD even with all the X.org drivers installed and you could fit Abiword, Gnumeric, Seamonkey, Dillo and so on with ease. Offering an alternative with Linux-Libre will be interesting too, as often the Libre kernel works faster than the vanilla one, and legacy computers have all…
I don't know if Musl is worth the hassle if one is only interested in the reduced size. I see the point if you have everything statically linked, but with dynamic linking, you have glibc sitting there just once with a few MB, and you don't have to tackle all the issues that can arise when using Musl (e.g., DNS). Alpine's compressed container image is nowadays something like 3 MB, okay, that's very small, but I wish t…
The "damn small" linux has 2 windows managers and 3 browsers. Doesn't look like it's small, looks like it's a collection of things the author enjoys.
I'm more amused by the inclusion of a GUI application for SCP and FTP. As someone who uses a full-featured desktop Linux distro as my daily driver, and uses SCP on a daily basis, I've never felt the need for anything but the CLI for that.
Also a number of games?
To be fair, the page states that "The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD," so it is explicitly more about showcasing a collection of lightweight applications than it is about providing the smallest distro.
I just checked Wikipedia, and was surprised to see the original DSL only had releases for about 3.5 years. > Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002 If you go all the way back to 2002, 50 MB for an old computer wasn't that small. I bought a new computer with 192 MB of RAM as late as 2005. My 32-bit, $400 discount laptop from 2009 has 4 GB of RAM, so 700 MB is rea…
I just checked Wikipedia, and was surprised to see the original DSL only had releases for about 3.5 years. > Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002 If you go all the way back to 2002, 50 MB for an old computer wasn't that small. I bought a new computer with 192 MB of RAM as late as 2005. My 32-bit, $400 discount laptop from 2009 has 4 GB of RAM, so 700 MB is rea…
>The forth version of xwoaf-rebuild is containing a lot of applications contained in only two binaries: busybox and mcb_xawplus. You get xcalc, xcalendar, xfilemanager, xminesweep, chimera, xed, xsetroot, xcmd, xinit, menu, jwm, desklaunch, rxvt, xtet42, torsmo, djpeg, xban2, text2pdf, Xvesa, xsnap, xmessage, xvl, xtmix, pupslock, xautolock and minimp3 via mcb_xawplus. And you get ash, basename, bunzip2, busybox, bzcat, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, extlinux, false, fdisk, fgrep, find, free, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hostname, id, ifconfig, init, insmod, kill, killall, klogd, ln, loadkmap, logger, login, losetup, ls, lsmod, lzmacat, mesg, mkdir, mke2fs, mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, mknod, mkswap, mount, mv, nslookup, openvt, passwd, ping, poweroff, pr, ps, pwd, readlink, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, test, top, touch, tr, true, tty, udhcpc, umount, uname, uncompress, unlzma, unzip, uptime, wc, which, whoami, yes, zcat via busybox. On top you get extensive help system, install scripts, mount scripts, configure scripts etc.
2.1mb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo
Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that's very dated
I just checked Wikipedia, and was surprised to see the original DSL only had releases for about 3.5 years. > Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002 If you go all the way back to 2002, 50 MB for an old computer wasn't that small. I bought a new computer with 192 MB of RAM as late as 2005. My 32-bit, $400 discount laptop from 2009 has 4 GB of RAM, so 700 MB is rea…
I remember my rig back in around 2002 had only 96 MB of RAM. I used to get the best out of it using Puppy and Slax distros.