Damn Small Linux 2024
damnsmalllinux.org
damnsmalllinux.org
https://twitter.com/systems_glitch/status/169651986595858851...
For anyone else interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card
http://www.baseballcardpedia.com/index.php/1999_Upper_Deck_P...
http://www.baseballcardpedia.com/index.php/2000_Upper_Deck_P...
Not a fan of storing data on someone else's computers, otherwise known as "the cloud".
Or unnecessarily running software from someone else's computers where I could just as easily run it locally, with better speed and reliability, otherwise known as "software as a service".
>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, xtmix, pupslock, xautolock and minimp3 via mcb_xawplus. And you get ash, basename, bunzip2, busybox, bzcat, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, extlinux, false, fdisk, fgrep, find, free, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hostname, id, ifconfig, init, insmod, kill, killall, klogd, ln, loadkmap, logger, login, losetup, ls, lsmod, lzmacat, mesg, mkdir, mke2fs, mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, mknod, mkswap, mount, mv, nslookup, openvt, passwd, ping, poweroff, pr, ps, pwd, readlink, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, test, top, touch, tr, true, tty, udhcpc, umount, uname, uncompress, unlzma, unzip, uptime, wc, which, whoami, yes, zcat via busybox. On top you get extensive help system, install scripts, mount scripts, configure scripts etc.
2.1mb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo
Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that's very dated
2.1 MB installed? The ISO file seemed to be just 1716224 bytes (1.7MB).
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120301074213/https://retired.b... [2] https://github.com/uclinux-dev/elf2flt
https://web.archive.org/web/20230515075935/http://wiki.osll....
https://github.com/jcmvbkbc/linux-xtensa/commits/xtensa-6.4-...
https://bit-tech.net/news/tech/cpus/linux-atmel-microcontrol...
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)
Might do that this weekend
> The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD, or a hard limit of 700MB.
Fun fact: It was developed by Robert Shingledecker, who was previously the lead developer of Damn Small Linux.
I never had to use tinycore for recovery but it gave me enough confidence to keep messing with new packages and drivers.
Due to its small footprint the boot times almost felt like instant on.
But yeah, full Wayland desktop (well, sway) and Firefox -- no problem. I occasionally use a debian chroot to pull up gnucash (accounting program) which works as a backup but it's rare. My debian chroot is mostly to run a 10 year old printer driver from Epson that's compiled against glibc, but doing a little trickery with a small C program works just fine with CUPS still running in alpine (print filters operate on stdin and stdout, so you can launch them in a chroot by themselves no problem).
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.
LFS has the topic of package management covered quite nicely I think[1]. They describe the contraints and approaches that might be possible, and what the real world solutions to those are (PRM, DEB, et al).
There have even been some package managers designed (or at least discussions of what the design would look like) for LFS explicitly over the years, but none seemed to have come to fruition, and I can't find any links to them.
1: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/9.0-systemd/chapte...
Edit: found the announcement https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux#Versions_and_...
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.
No, I don't need to go this far, but I want to.
Unfortunately, I don't really have any resources to share. I just know how to boot a vmlinuz with an initramfs using QEMU, and decided to download the Linux kernel source code and try compiling it.
https://github.com/abiosoft/colima?tab=readme-ov-file
Its user interface is Docker-like, using containers.
For full desktop, I've only used the commercial app "Parallels", which can set up an Ubuntu desktop for you. Also Fedora and Alpine and Debian I believe.
But
> I don't really have any resources to share. I just know how to boot a vmlinuz with an initramfs using QEMU, and decided to download the Linux kernel source code and try compiling it.
I highly recommend working through Linux from Scratch and possibly the Gentoo Handbook. It's a journey.
That's... odd. Does it break if you just use the default `make defconfig` configuration? Because pruning what's built in without breaking it is hard-ish IME but it shouldn't just fail silently. Or... when you say "It just stops" you don't by any chance mean that it finished and you just need to find the actual binar(y|ies) it produced?
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!
> Hats off to Puppy Linux for staying one of the few that still offer a full desktop environment in a small size.
Don't forget SliTaz too, it's still tiny:
> Root filesystem taking up about 100 MB and ISO image of less than 40 MB.
Conceptually the need still exists today, even if the whole landscape has changed in the meantime. I'll look forward to trying this out!
> 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 reasonable.
I even had it set up to use "dial knocking" to force it to connect remotely and send me an email with its IP address so I didn't need dynamic DNS.
In addition to NAT for my Ethernet (10BASE2) connected devices, it provided an Internet connection to my Telnet-accessible PDP-11/73 (15.2 MHz CPU, 4MB RAM, 456 MB hard drive [14" / 36 cm platters, 148 lb / 67 kg]) running 2.11BSD via SLIP.
I remember my rig back in around 2002 had only 96 MB of RAM. I used to get the best out of it using Puppy and Slax distros.
One of the first "approachable" Linux distributions circa 1993 was the Soft Landing Systems (SLS) 2-floppy disk set. One held the bootloader and kernel, the other the root filesystem. The kernel disk was swapped out during the boot process, so after that you only needed to leave the root system floppy in. Then, you could use a not uncommon second floppy drive for removable data disks. The SLS system was text console only, but I think (?) had an editor and gcc.
My first persistent installation, Slackware, was on a system with about 8 MB RAM and a 40 MB HDD dedicated to Linux. This had X Windows, Emacs, multiple dev tools, and modem based internet.
https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo
On games, sgt-puzzles and bsdgames fit well, among nethack/slashem, DCSS and OFC Frotz too plus a few libre games (Spiritwrak and such). Slashem+BSDGames+3 adventures for Frotz would weight less than 20MB I think. Compressed, about 7.
BTW, I'd ditch XMMS for Audacious; a Pentium 3/4 today would be more than enough to run it.
BTW Visidata it's huge, use sc-im+Gnuplot.
On browsers, felinks supports Gopher and Gemini too. Gopher has nice stuff as gopher://magical.fish, Gemini has similar places too.
This was the only distro that I could fit on a memory stick, which were novel at the time (and memory was $$$ if you can believe that).
I stuck this into a machine I made from parts I found at our recycling center, and threw them in a shoebox.
Good times.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6285b37e9f968526f953c714993ff2f76c6a4d29&dn=dsl-2024.alpha.iso&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969
Hopefully that magnet URI works. This is the first time I've tried to create one. Hopefully the tracker works too, I seem to be getting intermittent "Connection failed" errors from it. If anyone already knows how to properly serve torrents, please school me. :-)
Size is 698126336 bytes. Checksum is at https://damnsmalllinux.org/download/dsl-2024.alpha.iso.md5.t... (looks like they only have an MD5 checksum posted).
I still remember running it in computer lab around 2006-2007 for fun. At that time, the PC was dual boot: Windows XP and Debian.
Wonder why now the ISO is significantly much bigger: greater than 600 MB? It used to be like 50 MB or less.
Doesn't look like it's small, looks like it's a collection of things the author enjoys.
I wouldn't mind a few extra mb of software if it improves my overall user experience. The nice thing about DSL is that its slim despite having a pretty comprehensive app suite.
I'm more amused by the inclusion of a GUI application for SCP and FTP. As someone who uses a full-featured desktop Linux distro as my daily driver, and uses SCP on a daily basis, I've never felt the need for anything but the CLI for that.
Also a number of games?
To be fair, the page states that "The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD," so it is explicitly more about showcasing a collection of lightweight applications than it is about providing the smallest distro.
Dillo and links2 might have a harder time with js and css tho, I'm not even sure if they support js at all.
Program sizes have ballooned by an order of magnitude or more, so unfortunately so must DSL's target size if it expects to retain feature-parity, but it's still a lot of bang for one's disk-space buck by the looks of it.
The 512k is impressive.
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 :)
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.
With 700MB, IceWM and ZZZFM you could fit half a CD even with all the X.org drivers installed and you could fit Abiword, Gnumeric, Seamonkey, Dillo and so on with ease.
Offering an alternative with Linux-Libre will be interesting too, as often the Libre kernel works faster than the vanilla one, and legacy computers have all the drivers working. Propietary drivers won't work anymore such as Nvidia which some of the older ones might not even compile with DKMS.
Alpine's compressed container image is nowadays something like 3 MB, okay, that's very small, but I wish they had an 8 MB glibc version. On the other hand, there is debian-slim, but it's not as good as Alpine when it comes down to stripping down the size, it still weighs in at around 30 MB. I'm still using it, though, although I think it could be smaller.
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).
I have been looking for a minimal linux distribution to run under qemu, so I've been shopping in this small distro market.
I really like 'tiny core' best so far in terms of functionality / size, but I would love to not have to backbend to get it to persist to disk.
Really cool stuff. Might stick this on an old laptop when I get home.
I may give DSL 2024 a try and see how it compares.
I normally use fatdog64 (slackware'ish, but built from scratch), but I gave VoidPup a spin, and quite liked it.
BTW, comes in 32 & 64 bit versions, so your use case would be covered.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613
I don't know if DSL has updated to use that version yet, but thanks again to rodarima for picking that up!
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.
In a similar vein, I think there's a Slackware-based release of Slax again!
(posting this from a ThinkPad T61 running Slackware 15)
Damn Small Linux was my first introduction to Linux because it was the only thing I could download in ~4 hours on dialup without hogging the phones all day long.
I will have to fire this up and have a damn good time.
Please contact your hosting provider to correct issues causing your website to be offline.
while i like this idea in theory, in practice the energy efficiency and lower electricity costs of newer hardware mean that in terms of both cost and environmental impact it would probably be better to recycle the old hardware and buy something new in most cases.
Completely agree, other than nobody is willing to recycle the hardware in any environmentally friendly way. So "recycle" pretty much just means "send it to some poor country who is perfectly fine polluting their ecosystem to pull anything valuable from the junk".
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...
We used to ridicule the likes of HP shipping a replacement screw in a 3 foot cube box - perhaps we should be applying similar thinking to software.
Well, it's your environment, you would probably have to figure that out for yourself.
I don't think you would have to go fully retro to be more environmentally responsible.
When it comes to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, this is a proven hierarchy where lots of times it's like an order of magnitude better if you can reduce compared to merely reuse. And once again better to reuse as much as you can, before you finally recycle (which can require so much reprocessing beyond that needed for simple reuse) to extract any worthwhile components to be used in a circular way, that can preferebly displace the need for brand new raw materials or ingredients in freshly manufactured new products.
It's quite possible for freshly manufactured new products to be more environmentally friendly then ever and as high-technology as you would like, you just have to make the committment and step up to the plate.
Everybody's situation is different, but I do think there is a good reason why people say "think local" so much more, the deeper they do the math.
You shouldn't fail to figure, how much money does it cost just to work, and further how much of that is just to get to work?
How much pollution do you have to create just to earn the money to be able to work in the first place?
For everything you consume, or even worse waste, how much potentially environmentally damaging work did you (plus everyone else in the chain) have to do just to earn the money needed, and that's before the actual consumption could even be paid for? Whether consumption takes place before or after it ever gets paid for.
Then you can more accurately decide the degree of balance you are going to try and maintain, between consumption and conservation.
It's all so personal so you shouldn't let it bug you, just do the math for yourself and take action accordingly.
Most people can easily find some low-hanging room for improvement, sometimes really obvious stuff but it's nothing to get embarassed about.
Don't get me started on the way different currencies have different degrees of toxicity, and not only dependent on their current relative exchange rates.
But you can only imagine that for two workers doing identical work, each earning "equivalent value" but in different denominations, when there is any difference in their environmental impact it could only be due to the difference in impact between the currencies themselves. Naturally including bitcoin and things like that along with "regular" money.
No. Actually. It's not my environment at all. I could just leave and go somewhere else. Like Mars, Heaven, or somewhere else.
And I'll be taking three gigajoules per second of power production with me.
> It's good to minimize consumption of Earth's resources to maximize the displacement of the need for extraterrestrial raw materials and ingredients for the manufacture of new things.
What you're trying to sell me is something that is physically impossible. Entropy will still eventually—literally kill you if you actually did what you're advocating for (which is degrowth and primitivism). So, you don't actually believe what you're trying to sell to people as an "environmental conservative." Unless you're a zealous fanatic or something.
Unfortunately, Earth was meant to be used up into a big void of nothingness with this exploitation of a planet followed by the next complete consumption of a giant world. Mars is in our sights. As is the rest of the Solar system.
And we may as well go to infinity and beyond.
After all, time and entropy aren't really on our side. Solving the problem of our scheduled annihilation is the real action to think about as a responsible person who isn't afraid of objective mathematics and analysis that doesn't miss crucial variables in global dynamics.
Sorry about having nothing to sell, it was all sold out by more well-informed and more persuasive geeks than me, way before I had a chance to get near any soapboxes.
Nothing wrong with a little reminder that some people's fruit hangs a lot lower than others.
And that pleases me.
Because you're forced to turn into a monster yourself. If you don't want to starve and die.
So a little skilled zealotry is kinda essential. ;) So is probably persuading and selling others to your side. So that you can form a competent party of universe survival enthusiasts.
People are way ahead of me on that, with skills that may only be valuable on my home planet, I'm sure to be left behind in the dust :(
Some things stand the test of time better than others.
And some ideas are not that new but maybe the earlier the concept the better. Not that long ago back at the beginning of 1970 Neil Young had something to say about how things might work out in the decade to come, from "After the Gold Rush":
"Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies."
"Well I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships . . ."
"The loading had begun, flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun."
https://genius.com/Neil-young-after-the-gold-rush-lyrics
But that was when every year that came along was another "routine" manned moon landing.
(2016) “After The Gold Rush is an environmental song,” Young said:
https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-stories-behind-the-...
Throwing away a five years old chromebook because google decided they don’t want to support it is very different than throwing away a Pentium4 (more of a heating machine than a processor)