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Damn Small Linux 2024

damnsmalllinux.org

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Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#131

Post by da_chicken »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #65
urbandw311er wrote: post #42

AbiWord seems like an odd choice for a word processor— it seems to be virtually obsolete.

Is there anything newer that isn't absurdly bloated?

Doubtful. TED's last stable release was in 2013, and that's the lightweight one I'm familiar with.

There's KWrite, but I'd be surprised if that were less bloated than AbiWord.

Markdown text might be fine, but I wouldn't expect markdown to PDF via pandoc to be particuarly "lightweight." There's the range of typesetting or desktop publishing stuff like TeXmacs, groff, or LyX, but I don't expect those to be particularly light, either. There's WordGrinder, a terminal based word processor, but I've never used that.

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#132

Post by S201 »

cromka wrote: post #35

Interesting fact is that DSL used to be 50MB because that’s how big a business-card sized CDs were. And yes, there used to be business-card sized CDs.

I still have a stack of these lying around. I used them in high school for carrying a live Linux distro in my wallet to use on the school computers since the BIOSs were too old to support booting from USB. Needless to say, the school district IT department was not happy with me.

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#133

Post by mrighele »

> DSL 2024 currently only ships with two window managers: Fluxbox and JWM. Both are lightweight, fairly intuitive, and easy to use.

I wonder what they will move to once they have to start using Wayland. Is there a lightweight, user-friend, and stable compositor ? (My experience is that you can choose two, but not three).

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#134

Post by l33tman »

xattt wrote: post #69
l33tman wrote: post #63

I had the Linux kernel and some simple user-space tools like busybox running on an embedded platform with 512 kB RAM and 2MB flash back in 1999! Those were fun times. To be honest 512 kb was possible but very on the limit, I think the product we launched with it had a few megs of RAM eventually. We had to invent a journalling flash filesystem as well in order to make it work in practice, something that didn't exist b…

All the WRT54G(L) derivatives were an example of this minimalism, with some versions running on 2MB flash and 8MB RAM. The 512k is impressive.

Yeah the 2/8 combo was probably what we went with in the product as well. The 512k was more like a shoehorned concept demo in an existing product.

The next thing we did was make a version of our CPU with an MMU, designed to work optimally with Linux (the first version was on the uClinux concept, with a kernel without MMU support and user-space programs that couldn't rely on fork() or mmap() fully). After a year or 2 with MMU-less Linux, it was like heaven to be able to run on an MMU :)

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#135

Post by mike_hock »

ls65536 wrote: post #20
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #7

Woah, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time! It says that it fits on a CD, but how about the other requirements? e.g. how much RAM is needed, and what kind of instruction set does the CPU need to support? is a 386 enough or do you need 486/586/686 level instructions?

I got it running as a VM guest on QEMU+KVM, exposing only a 486 CPU profile with 256 MB RAM, and it was still usable (with terminal, file manager, and some light web browsing). Looking at the system's memory usage though, it appears that going much lower than about 200 MB RAM would probably make it quite difficult to use (at least without relying on swap, which could make it even more miserable depending on the devic…

That only fakes some cpuid flags. KVM cannot blacklist specific instructions or emulate idiosyncrasies of specific vintage CPUs.

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#136

Post by anthk »

makerdiety wrote: post #109
fuzzfactor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus just earning the money to buy the new hardware is bad enough.

So, for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards? Stop working and stuff?

We did work with Jabber/Email and 512MB/1GB of RAM running similar chat clients, desktop environments (XFCE 4.6 was much faster than 4.16), video players and office suites.

Nowadays to do the same today you need 10X the resources just for a chat application.

And by 'chat' I don't mean 'irc'. Jabber, embedded Youtube URL's, inline LaTeX documents...

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#137

Post by phendrenad2 »

ravenstine wrote: post #27

Wow, this is crazy. I came across the DSL website last night while trying to figure out how to compile a minimal Linux kernel myself, and now here it is on HN! I used DSL back in high school when it was new. As a side note, why does compiling Linux have to be so... obtuse? It just stops for me after several minutes of building out objects with no explanation.

> As a side note, why does compiling Linux have to be so... obtuse? It just stops for me after several minutes of building out objects with no explanation.

The Linux kernel compilation scripts use the lowest-common-denominator toolset: make/sed/awk. It would be awesome to rewrite them to use Python or some other higher-level language, but then it wouldn't run on a Japanese supercomputer built in 1986 and long-ago mothballed, and you never know when you'll need that!

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#138

Post by haunter »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #100
haunter wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think you can use the old toolchain; newer kernel+busybox are unlikely to build with that old of a compiler. Although, following the build steps with modern sources and toolchain would be an interesting exercise.

>Although, following the build steps with modern sources and toolchain would be an interesting exercise.

Might do that this weekend

Re: Damn Small Linux 2024

#139

Post by flykespice »

I remember this being one of my very first distros when I started using Linux, probably because of its very attractive name like many did here.

However what moved me away from it was the sudden abandoment due to the fallout between a primary contributor and the project's leader, to which the former made the focal point on his distrowatch interview, he would later create his own distro called TinyCoreLinux.

In my opinion this a fruitless attempt to restore any credibility that the project lead has lost after over a decade of negligence and abandoment.

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