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Damn Small Linux 2024

damnsmalllinux.org

81–90 of 185 posts

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#81

Fantastic to have another option with modern tools! great work that will be appreciated by many. Between this, Puppy, and Tiny Core Linux so much old hardware can be put to potential use. I’d also mention Finnix as an excellent rescue image solution. Any other awesome projects for limited hardware and Linux use that should be more well known?

> so much old hardware

Not so much, actually. When you aim for anything that resembles modern “desktop computing” (maybe with at least some “web browsing”), you are limited to decent hardware configurations from last 15 years or so. Yes, you can show to your grand-grand-grandkids how it really was back in the days once, but you are not going to study the splash screens while programs initialize, or wait for each image to appear for a couple of seconds when skimming trough an archive, or watch page load progress bars move in the browser. But with that decent hardware, you almost always can install bog standard modern Debian with an ascetic desktop, and have much less support issues than with specialized system. It'll be the same Linux anyway.

Although it is possible that it won't work for some top performance purely 32 bit CPUs, because non 64 bit builds are certainly out of fashion today, even though some 32 bit distributions still exist.

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#82
post #44
post #38

A truly damn small Linux is the xwoaf rebuild project 4.0 https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html >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,…

"2.1mb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo " 2.1 MB installed? The ISO file seemed to be just 1716224 bytes (1.7MB).

I was checking the final version (xwoaf_rebuild4.iso), that is 2205696 bytes

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#83

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…

Aren't you mistaking disk space for memory size? Available disk space in 2002 was much larger.

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#84
post #38

A truly damn small Linux is the xwoaf rebuild project 4.0 https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html >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,…

wow! In the same league of μLinux (muLinux). I remember back in the day, running a full X11 environment with only two floppies.

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#85
post #38

A truly damn small Linux is the xwoaf rebuild project 4.0 https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html >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,…

> Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that's very dated

The whole thing is dated; that looks like more of a retrocomputing project (mostly) than an updated version. I mean, busybox 1.00 is probably fine for what it is, but it's not exactly new. (Note that this is a clarification but not a criticism; having played with things like "how old of a distro can I shove in docker and run on a current kernel", I certainly support retrocomputing, I just think we should acknowledge that that's what we're doing)

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#86
post #38

A truly damn small Linux is the xwoaf rebuild project 4.0 https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html >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,…

> Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that's very dated The whole thing is dated; that looks like more of a retrocomputing project (mostly) than an updated version. I mean, busybox 1.00 is probably fine for what it is, but it's not exactly new. (Note that this is a clarification but not a criticism; having played with things like "how old of a distro can I shove in docker and run on a current kernel", I certainly support retro…

Yeah agreed. Given the toolchain source is available I wonder how low we can go with a modern kernel and the newest busybox

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#88

Fantastic to have another option with modern tools! great work that will be appreciated by many. Between this, Puppy, and Tiny Core Linux so much old hardware can be put to potential use. I’d also mention Finnix as an excellent rescue image solution. Any other awesome projects for limited hardware and Linux use that should be more well known?

> so much old hardware Not so much, actually. When you aim for anything that resembles modern “desktop computing” (maybe with at least some “web browsing”), you are limited to decent hardware configurations from last 15 years or so. Yes, you can show to your grand-grand-grandkids how it really was back in the days once, but you are not going to study the splash screens while programs initialize, or wait for each imag…

The computer I use most of the time is a 19 year old (2005) laptop. I run Debian with LXDE and Firefox on it and, although you have to be a little bit patient with some websites, I am generally still very satisfied with it.

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how much space do those packages take?

Take 3x what they could take.

Not really; the 3 browsers are dillo, links2, and badwolf. Of those, dillo and links2 are 100MB for one browser, or >120MB for 3, and 120 is less than 3x100.

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#90

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 running Linux Router Project [0] on a 1.44mb floppy disk back in the late 90s! Of course, it didn't have a GUI, but I don't think you could even fit the linux kernel on a single floppy disk today. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project

In 2000 i was using FloppyFW for same reason.
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