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Damn Small Linux

damnsmalllinux.org

75 pointstype030 comments

Could I also suggest Tiny Core Linux [0]? It still seems to be in active development, and the ISO which includes the kernel, shell, and window manager (FLWM, based off FLTK) weighs in at only 16mb in total. It's pretty impressive, and its good fun to play around with in a VM.

[0] http://www.tinycorelinux.net

This was written by a former DSL co-founder/developer. It's quite an interesting story! There is an interview with him here: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090323&mode=68#fea...

I actually ran this distro to do nodejs development for a while in a VM before they had windows support. It beats Cygwin and still is fast.

Agreed. It became my standard choice for micro linux installs over puppy, nano, dsl, etc.

To learn about embedded/headless/obscure-hardware Linux I would suggest checking out http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ instead or using a distribution like http://www.gentoo.org/ for awhile to get familiar with lower level concepts and building custom systems. Customize kernel options until things break, try at least one embedded platform, and build a PXE diskless boot system.

I ran Gentoo for years. I finally decided that it took too much time to maintain it, went with a simpler system.

Ditto. Compile time was pretty killer. But between my years spent running Slackware then Gentoo, I feel like I got a good feel for the core of how Linux systems should operate (and the benefit of someone else running the builds!)

Another still actively developed alternative is SliTaz [0].

Comes in images from 45Mb for a working desktop down to a bootable floppy, rolling release, runs in RAM with no persistence by default, and uses a custom package manager that, outside of having its own decently sized repo, can convert packages from Debian, RPM, Slax, Puppy, Slackware, NuTyX, Arch, Alpine, OpenWrt, 0Linux, paldo, Void and Tinycore according to the manual.

[0] http://www.slitaz.org/en/about/

Man, this brings back some middle school memories of back when my biggest USB drive was 128MB and I was playing with Linux live images for the first time. Sad to see why and how the project died.

It looks like DSL's website hasn't been updated since I found out about it 10 years ago.

And DSL itself hasn't been updated since 5 years ago (the most recent release candidate was in 2012).

I also remember LOAF - Linux on a Floppy

I'm not sure I even have any floppy disks laying around, much less a drive to put them in!

There is still Tom's root boot, which fits on a 1.44MB floppy, if you still have a drive accessible.

http://www.toms.net/rb/

Funnily enough, I just got one. I know what I'm doing this week!

Puppy Linux is still around as well. http://puppylinux.org/

I didn't even know DSL was still around

It looks like DSL died 9 years ago due to some infighting

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/static/act-ST/f-4/t-20537.1.ht...

Doesn't seem to have much activity since then.

Last time I used DSL, I believe it was running a 2.4 Linux kernel. I guess it still is, but it was slightly less obsolete at the time.

Another fun 2.4 Linux embedded distro is eMoviX — small enough you can put it on a CD with a movie, and boot the system off the CD to play it.

Alpine linux is smaller than this.

It's 8mb in a container, which is crazy good.

Omg yes alpine Linux is amazing

I used this 15 years ago from a 128Mb USB stick. It was my introduction to linux and set the bar really high for responsiveness. I think I even installed Windows 98 second edition on a computer running Windows XP just to feel the same.

If this is really kernel 2.4 and hasn't been touched since then, it's probably made out of remote root exploits at this point.

DSL hasn't been updated since 2012. But even when it was still under active development, they made the controversial decision that they would never ship 2.6 because it was just too big and bloated; and that all of the important bits would be backported to 2.4, because surely there were enough people sticking with 2.4 that it would be supported forever, right?

Why is this randomly posted?

Every couple years these things get posted by people who have discovered then for the first time, and then get voted up by those same people or by people who have a fondness for it.

I welcome the up voting of these sorts of things. It's great to see projects with new eyes, and be reminded that not everyone has the same historical experiences that I've had.

My thought exactly. It's been a long time since it was updated. It's a nice historical once-popular distro, but this post feels kinda random.

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I remember using DSL quite a bit back when I was first playing around with Linux. It was the only desktop-oriented Linux distro that seemed to actually run on my Compaq Presario 1210 (Tiny Core didn't even exist back then, and even when I did eventually try it, it choked on the laptop's weird graphics card). Pretty much nothing else was able to fit in the laptop's "whopping" 32MB or so of RAM (aside from Windows 2000 and older, as well as FreeDOS).

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