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Damn Small Linux

damnsmalllinux.org

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Re: Damn Small Linux

#41

Post by lizknope »

iszomer wrote: post #34
bayindirh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DSL is much older, and the original version came as a 50MB disk image. Current version clocks in ~700MB, again very small when compared to any modern Linux installation media. On the other hand, it seems like DSL takes a more extreme approach to slimming down i3/XFCE route, plus DSL contains Dillo which is arguably the latest modern-ish (to the most extent possible) and lightest browser in existence.

I still remember burning the dsl livecd image to a mini-cd shaped like a credit card (edges trimmed off) and using it on university workstations.

Yeah, I had one of these in my wallet with DSL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

Re: Damn Small Linux

#42

Post by flykespice »

Damn Small Linux was one of the first distros I tried out as teenager with a LiveCD. It's sad it fell out due to his lead being rather an asshole with his contributors and overall incompetent.

BTW, one of former core contributors went to make their own distro called TinyCoreLinux.

Re: Damn Small Linux

#43

Post by dorfsmay »

monus wrote: post #9

The 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.

The real issue is that old hardware use a lot of electrical power. You can get a small Single Board Computer with at least as much computing power as those but using 20 to 30 time less electrical power, and fitting in the palm of your hand.

Re: Damn Small Linux

#44

Post by shrubble »

lionkor wrote: post #23

You can run an entire, productive modern Linux, (minus a modern browser*) on 128MB of RAM and one slow core. If you push lower, you start running into issues. I would recommend having around 200MB or so of swap for sudden spikes of memory usage. An aggressive userspace OOM killer may make life easier. On Linux, if you just run SDDM that launches xfce, you will quickly OOM the system, because SDDM will stay in memory.…

Interesting post, thank you.

"Back in the day" people were running HP technical workstations, with X11 with CDE, with 128MB RAM, on Pentium-II equivalent speed CPUs - and they liked it!

Re: Damn Small Linux

#46

Post by mikkupikku »

dorfsmay wrote: post #43
monus wrote: post #9

The 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.

The real issue is that old hardware use a lot of electrical power. You can get a small Single Board Computer with at least as much computing power as those but using 20 to 30 time less electrical power, and fitting in the palm of your hand.

It's not really a real problem for most retro computing enthusiasts; it only comes out to a couple of bucks a month in electricity, and that's assuming you leave the computer running all month.

Re: Damn Small Linux

#47

Post by zoeysmithe »

dusted wrote: post #18

I 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…

I mean why is that a problem? Win95 engineering reflects the hardware of the time, the same way today's software engineering reflects the hardware of our time. There's no ideal here, there's no "this is correct," etc its all constantly changing.

This is like car guys today bemoaning the simpler carburetor age or the car guys before them bemoaning the model T age of simplicity. Its silly.

There will never be a scenario where you need all this lightweight stuff outside of extreme edge cases, and there's SO MUCH lightweight stuff its not even a worry.

Also its funny you should mention win95 because I suspect that reflects your age, but a lot of people here are from the dos/first mac/win 2.0 age, and for that crowd win95 was the horrible resource pig and complexity nightmare. Tech press and nerd culture back then was incredibly anti-95 for 'dumbing it all down' and 'being slow' but now its seen as the gold standard of 'proper computing.' So its all relative.

The way I see hardware and tech is that we are forced to ride a train. It makes stops but it cannot stop. It will always go to the next stop. Wanting to stay at a certain stop doesn't make sense and as in fact counter-productive. I wont go into this, but linux on the desktop could have been a bigger contender if the linux crowd and companies were willing to break a lot of things and 'start over' to be more competitive with mac or windows, which at he time did break a lot of things and did 'start over' to a certain degree.

The various implementations of linux desktop always came off clunky and tied to unix-culture conventions which dont really fit the desktop model, which wasn't really appealing for a lot of people, and a lot of that was based on nostalgia and this sort of idealizing old interfaces and concepts. I love kde but its definitely not remotely as appealing as win11 or macos gui and ease of use.

In other words, when nostalgia isn't pushed back upon, we get worse products. I see so much unquestionable nostalgia in tech spaces, I think its something that hurts open source projects and even many commercial ones.

Re: Damn Small Linux

#48

Post by foldor »

hansvm wrote: post #4
barbs wrote: post #3

Here'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.

There isn't enough detail for me to know how serious is was in regards to stores not being able to accept payments, but a date of this blog being 2010, and it being written about a time when every megabyte of filesize matters makes me think it was possibly much earlier, like maybe 2001-2005. If that's the case, maybe not being able to process cards wasn't as big of a deal as it would be today because you could likely assume most if not all customers could pay with cash if card payments were down.

Re: Damn Small Linux

#49

Post by IAmBroom »

shrubble wrote: post #44
lionkor wrote: post #23

You can run an entire, productive modern Linux, (minus a modern browser*) on 128MB of RAM and one slow core. If you push lower, you start running into issues. I would recommend having around 200MB or so of swap for sudden spikes of memory usage. An aggressive userspace OOM killer may make life easier. On Linux, if you just run SDDM that launches xfce, you will quickly OOM the system, because SDDM will stay in memory.…

Interesting post, thank you. "Back in the day" people were running HP technical workstations, with X11 with CDE, with 128MB RAM, on Pentium-II equivalent speed CPUs - and they liked it!

It built character.

Kids these days...

Re: Damn Small Linux

#50

Post by squarefoot »

I didn't know it was revived, had some fun with it back in the day. I'm curious to see how it compares against Alpine which is also very compact because of musl.
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