How does this compare to Alpine Linux, Amazon Linux and Slackware, including zipslack? Tiny Core Linux?
Damn Small Linux
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: Damn Small Linux
#12Here's a cool story of someone using a mini Linux (not DSL) to save a company-wide bug at a fast food chain. https://web.archive.org/web/20100520020401/http://therealedw...
The wildest part of that to me is that OP couldn't help out because there was somehow something more pressing than every non-franchise store not being able to accept payment and likely needing a lot of expertise to patch it fast enough.
I thought the same. Probably his boss first had to realize that OPs teammates needed more help.
Re: Damn Small Linux
#13Every time I looked at DSL, I never understood the need to include 4 Web Browsers in a distro that supposedly prides itself on size.
When you look at the actual list of those 4, it's not as hard to understand any more.
It's Firefox, Dillo, Links2 and Netsurf GTK :)
Dillo is something I'd love to daily drive like I did 20 years ago, but it would just fail on most modern websites. But it's what, 2MB in total (binary+libraries)?
Links2 is text terminal oriented. No modern browser can do that natively at all. All competition is even smaller (w3m, lynx). Plus links2 can run in graphics mode, even on a framebuffer, so you can run it without X server at all.
So Fx is the only "general purpose" browser on that list, but is just too big for old hardware.
Re: Damn Small Linux
#14Distros like these help troubleshoot boxes that are old/slow but also not used as computers in the traditional sense. For example network boxes, NAS, video recording boxes etc that can't run the latest LTS ubuntu well but can boot a distro like DSL. getting a vga out on these things with a fast to boot distro helps you fix things like corrupt drives, bad partitioning, bad boot loaders etc which needs a few terminal commands and a distro that boots up quickly.
It once took ubuntu 18.04 30 minutes to boot on an old dual core intel network box once. I switched to Xubuntu and it was about 5 minutes. imagine having to do multiple reboots.
Re: Damn Small Linux
#15Why is there so many spammy junk ads on this site? :|
Hundreds of ads partners. The GDPR banner is so annoying I won’t even go further.
Re: Damn Small Linux
#16Every time I looked at DSL, I never understood the need to include 4 Web Browsers in a distro that supposedly prides itself on size.
So you can use as little CPU and RAM as necessary to browse the page you want to read at any given moment.
Re: Damn Small Linux
#17How does this compare to Alpine Linux, Amazon Linux and Slackware, including zipslack? Tiny Core Linux?
TinyCore’s “Core" is still just 17 MB and is text-based. It includes the tools to install everything else. It only supports wired networks for the most part.
“TinyCore” is 23MB. It includes a minimal GUI desktop.
“CorePlus” at 243 MB is internationalized, has a half dozen more window managers to choose, has wireless networking tools, and a remastering tool to spin your own.
Re: Damn Small Linux
#18I recently used it to boot a ~1996 Compaq Presario from CD-Rom to image the hard-drive to a USB stick before wiping it for my retro-computer fun :)
It's kind of sad to hear "adult" people claim in all seriousness that it's reasonable that a kernel alone spends more memory than the minimum requirement for running Windows 95, the operating system with kernel, drivers, a graphical user interface and even a few graphical user-space applications.
Re: Damn Small Linux
#19The problem with old computers isn’t that they’re slow but fail randomly so they don’t need “smaller” Linux, they need more resiliency that can work with random RAM erros, corrupt disks, absurd CPU instruction failures. The size was a 90s problem.
Do you have any recommendations on resilient software and practices?
Re: Damn Small Linux
#20Why is there so many spammy junk ads on this site? :|
I run NoScript + uBlock and I thought "wow what a pretty, simple site!". Maybe the author does the same.