15 ms·

Damn Small Linux 2024

399 points by abbbi 3y ago

ape4 3y ago
A good choice to run a simple application in a container?
- a_dabbler 3y ago
  No, use Alpine for that
anthk 3y ago
I'd put this dillo fork: https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo 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.
- snvzz 3y ago
  gopherus is a decent, low resource, console-able, gopher client.
  - anthk 3y ago
    sacc too; but felinks provides Gemini.
montroser 3y ago
I remember DSL fondly. It was a marvel then, and maybe now in retrospect even moreso -- that so much functionality could be packed into such a small footprint. Conceptually the need still exists today, even if the whole landscape has changed in the meantime. I'll look forward to trying this out!
alchemist1e9 3y ago
Fantastic to have another option with modern tools! great work that will be appreciated by many. Between this, Puppy, and Tiny Core Linux so much old hardware can be put to potential use. I’d also mention Finnix as an excellent rescue image solution. Any other awesome projects for limited hardware and Linux use that should be more well known?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I'd say Alpine is in that category, and depending on how you count "Linux", OpenWrt too
- seemaze 3y ago
  I've been quite happy with Alpine Linux. You can build it up to suit your needs for desktop, server, embedded or containers, but will run quite speedily on any supported arch from a few tens of MB of memory. The APK package manager is pleasant and quick, and the package list is quite extensive.
  - Atreiden 3y ago
    Wow I've never heard of someone running Alpine as a desktop OS before. How is the experience without glibc? What are you using for a DE? I'd thought X relied on glibc
    - dmwilcox 3y ago
      I've run musk based distro for a couple of years with no trouble (KISS Linux and now some hacked up Alpine monster I put together). I don't do streaming video that requires DRM -- which will be a non-starter due to the widevine/whatever plugins being compiled against glibc. 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).
anthk 3y ago
Also by using Musl and Alpine as a base the amount of software you can put in 700MB it's huge. 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.
- znpy 3y ago
  700mb used to host the whole ubuntu desktop for many years though
- tutfbhuf 3y ago
  I don't know if Musl is worth the hassle if one is only interested in the reduced size. I see the point if you have everything statically linked, but with dynamic linking, you have glibc sitting there just once with a few MB, and you don't have to tackle all the issues that can arise when using Musl (e.g., DNS). 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.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    I run Alpine on a desktop and a couple of laptops (low-end ex-chromebooks, one of them via postmarketos), and it's not really a hassle IME. Granted, I'm not doing a lot of building things from source (or if I do it's in docker and distro is easy to change) so maybe I'm just avoiding the pain, but if your uses are covered by officially packaged software it Just Works™.
lemme_tell_ya 3y ago
I played around with DSL a lot back in 2009 or so, it ran great on old PCs I salvaged from the garbage. > 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. https://www.slitaz.org/en/about/ https://www.slitaz.org/en/about/
ColonelPhantom 3y ago
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?
- ls65536 3y ago
  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 device being used there).
  - mike_hock 3y ago
    That only fakes some cpuid flags. KVM cannot blacklist specific instructions or emulate idiosyncrasies of specific vintage CPUs.
    - ls65536 3y ago
      Yeah, that's a good point. As a further experiment, I tried with various "hardware" combinations (from 486's to Pentium II's) in 86Box, which actually performs such emulation, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get it to boot properly (kernel panics during initialization, if it gets that far at all).
    - anthk 3y ago
      You can run bare qemu without kvm, there's a fag to disable it.
- npteljes 3y ago
  It was an abandoned project for a long time, that's why the memory is old[0]. I remember because I was looking for something very light to boot up an old chunky armada laptop, and I ended up on Puppy Linux, even though I wanted to use DSL because of the cool name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux#Versions_and_ports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux#Versions_and_...
pushedx 3y ago
I used DSL back around when it was released (and 64 MiB flash drives were common) to get around my school's network filtering. I think this was one of the reasons they hired new IT staff the following year, because the technique caught on even with the non-nerdy crowd.
- brnt 3y ago
  Reminds me of cramming an installed QuakeII on a 64MB USB stick, and quickly booting it up on a few library computers when we had an hour off in high school. They blocked installers, but not 'portable' executables or network access.
- montecarl 3y ago
  Yes, this brings back such memories for me too! I also used to boot from removable media to use linux on school computers. The librarian assumed I was some kind of computer hacker and reported me to the schools IT admin. I thought I was in trouble. Instead he took me under his wing and had me work with him after school on some fun projects! Really helped me understand that the skills I was learning were valuable and that I had an aptitude for it.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Kudos to the admin, that’s a much better way to handle such a situation than what I’ve sadly read many stories about, where the IT dept seemingly takes mild cleverness by students as a personal insult and punishes them.
systems_glitch 3y ago
Cool! DSL replaced LNX-BBC for me some time in 2005. Glad to see development has resumed. In a similar vein, I think there's a Slackware-based release of Slax again! (posting this from a ThinkPad T61 running Slackware 15)
metalspot 3y ago
> keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills 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.
- tw04 3y ago
  >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".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- anthk 3y ago
  Building and shipping new machines requires far more envionmental related costs.
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    Plus just earning the money to buy the new hardware is bad enough.
    - makerdiety 3y ago
      So, for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards? Stop working and stuff?
      - fuzzfactor 3y ago
        >for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards? 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.
bachmeier 3y ago
I just checked Wikipedia, and was surprised to see the original DSL only had releases for about 3.5 years. > 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.
- anthk 3y ago
  50MB for a pocket OS was perfecly small. Compare it to a 6-7-8 CD release of SuSE, Debian or Mandrake. Or the 700MB Knoppix CD back in the day. You could download DSL in reasonable time.
- maxmalkav 3y ago
  IIRC 50MB was not the space needed in RAM but the size of the whole basic installation on disk
- pimlottc 3y ago
  I remember running Linux Router Project [0] on a 1.44mb floppy disk back in the late 90s! Of course, it didn't have a GUI, but I don't think you could even fit the linux kernel on a single floppy disk today. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project
  - fs_tab 3y ago
    Technically, you can compile the 6.8 kernel using "make tinyconfig" (which results in a 509kb image). Of course, this isn't usable on actual hardware, but it is a good baseline to build off.
  - mobilio 3y ago
    In 2000 i was using FloppyFW for same reason.
    - pimlottc 3y ago
lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
The "damn small" linux has 2 windows managers and 3 browsers. Doesn't look like it's small, looks like it's a collection of things the author enjoys.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  And how much space do those packages take?
  - lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
    Take 3x what they could take.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Not really; the 3 browsers are dillo, links2, and badwolf. Of those, dillo and links2 are <10MB each including dependencies, while badwolf uses webkit which AFAICT is on the order of ~100MB. It's not practical to only have dillo or links2, so what it "could" take is >100MB for one browser, or >120MB for 3, and 120 is less than 3x100.
- nlunbeck 3y ago
  > All the applications are chosen for their functionality, small size, and low dependencies 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.
- warner25 3y ago
  I also raised an eyebrow at the three web browsers, but then I was thinking that it's quite likely that none of them are reliable for opening a modern webpage, so users might have to routinely try more than one. 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.
kotaKat 3y ago
Holy fucking shit my childhood. 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.
gorjusborg 3y ago
Wow, this submission has fantastic timing for me. 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.
ravenstine 3y ago
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.
- codethief 3y ago
  Are you looking to build just a minimal kernel or also a minimal distribution? (Which is what I happened to be thinking about last night :)) In the latter case, do you know any good resources about that topic?
  - akkartik 3y ago
    Depending on how minimal a distribution you want, a few years ago I had a way to take a single ELF binary created by my computing stack built up from machine code (https://github.com/akkartik/mu https://github.com/akkartik/mu) and package it up with just a linux kernel and syslinux (whatever _that_ is) to create a bootable disk image I could then ship to a cloud server (https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode, though I don't use Linode anymore these days) and run on a VPS to create a truly minimal webserver. If this seems at all relevant I'd be happy to answer questions or help out.
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Yocto, Linux From Scratch (LFS) and buildroot for embedded systems come to mind. https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/
  - eKKiM 3y ago
    Some resources i used in the past are Linux From Scratch https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ and Yocto https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.yoctoproject.org/ However i have no idea how up to date these are.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Downloading at ~100KB/s... hitting the front page of HN is probably a good usecase for bittorrent.
- meonkeys 3y ago
  Mine went fast. Happy to share: 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.txt https://damnsmalllinux.org/download/dsl-2024.alpha.iso.md5.t... (looks like they only have an MD5 checksum posted).
ctrlaltdylan 3y ago
What a throwback. 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.
foxmoss 3y ago
Love this distro, its the only one that loads fast on web x86 emulation. Sad that they're upping the size but 700mb is still leagues smaller then most other distros.
cromka 3y ago
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.
- glenstein 3y ago
  A different way of saying the same thing: business-card sized and shaped.
  - throwaway71271 3y ago
    those used to make the most horrible noise when you actually use them
    - robinsonb5 3y ago
      They weren't too great with vertically mounted drives or slot-loading drives, either.
      - sitzkrieg 3y ago
        they werent too great period :)
      - mikepurvis 3y ago
        I feel like slot loading drives were kind of a later thing, though— I only ever saw them in cars until after the Nintendo Wii in 2006. Other than the iMac, computer drives always had trays.
        ngcc_hk 3y ago
        Apple like to suck.
    - myself248 3y ago
      Only if you had one of those fancy high-speed drives. They were nice and quiet at 2x.
haunter 3y ago
A truly damn small Linux is the xwoaf rebuild project 4.0 https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html >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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that's very dated
- vardump 3y ago
  "2.1mb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo" 2.1 MB installed? The ISO file seemed to be just 1716224 bytes (1.7MB).
  - haunter 3y ago
    I was checking the final version (xwoaf_rebuild4.iso), that is 2205696 bytes
- moffkalast 3y ago
  So uh, who's gonna be first to get it running on a Pi Pico?
  - vardump 3y ago
chrsw 3y ago
I like Fluxbox, it's really simple and doesn't get in your way.
urbandw311er 3y ago
AbiWord seems like an odd choice for a word processor— it seems to be virtually obsolete.
- robinsonb5 3y ago
  Is there anything newer that isn't absurdly bloated?
  - da_chicken 3y ago
    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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
signa11 3y ago
high-end CPUs have more cache than that !
- Narishma 3y ago
  Which high-end CPUs have 700 MB of cache?
  - signa11 3y ago
    whoops sorry! i thought it was still around 50m or thereabouts…
  - ukuina 3y ago
    AMD's EPYC Milan-X was announced a couple years ago with 768MB of L3 cache.
l33tman 3y ago
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 back then either. But Linux then was really a breakthrough compared to the horrible mess of embedded OSes that were needed otherwise to handle TCP/IP, filesystems and multitasking.
- xattt 3y ago
  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.
  - l33tman 3y ago
    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 :)
Dwedit 3y ago
For those who had to search it, "Badwolf" is a Webkit based browser.
- ukuina 3y ago
  Thanks, I was wondering if it was related to New Who.
sylware 3y ago
badwolf... light?? It is a webkit based browser, come on...
tbitrust 3y ago
What are some use cases of Damn Small Linux?
harvie 3y ago
666 MB iso
ryzvonusef 3y ago
thank you for sharing, but surprised they are offering a direct download link instead of a torrent, they are bound to get slashdotted.
lelandbatey 3y ago
Damn small Linux was the first Linux I could actually use as a child/adolescent because the downloaded zip file included a copy of QEMU.exe (and a .BAT file to boot DSL) that I could use to get a taste of Linux with no prior experience, using a Windows computer. Growing up in Redmond WA, home of Microsoft, it felt very subversive to young me to use a non-windows operating system. I'm forever thankful for that seemingly random include in the download; I probably wouldn't have become the person I am without it.
veganjay 3y ago
I was looking for a lightweight OS to run on old Asus Eee PC 1005 HA, which uses a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 processor. I installed Void Linux (https://voidlinux.org/ https://voidlinux.org/). I may give DSL 2024 a try and see how it compares.
- anthk 3y ago
  N270, I use Hyperbola with CWM+UXterm+ CLI/TUI software except mupdf, sxiv and mpv. SBCL and Vis it's my "IDE". It runs pretty snappy.
- catherinecodes 3y ago
  Void Linux is great for minimal installs. Gentoo fits the bill nicely too. Both allow for small init systems and, at least in the case of Gentoo, multiple bootloaders and initramfs tools.
- isr 3y ago
  VoidPup may also pique your interest. It's a puppy linux build using void packages & the xbps package manager. 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.
SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
Great memories of the original DSL. New one looks great at a glance, really nice collection of applications. Blown away they managed to fit all that on a CD. From the page, it sounds like they did a lot of work to make it happen. Really cool stuff. Might stick this on an old laptop when I get home.
mrighele 3y ago
> 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).
- netdoll 3y ago
  If I had to wager a guess, probably something like labwc would end up in that role for a distro of DSL's scope and philosophy. However, I think we're still a while away from that, and for the targeted machines, X is still completely fine and will remain so for a long while.
flykespice 3y ago
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.
crznp 3y ago
> Dillo (super-light GUI browser) See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613 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!
anta40 3y ago
Nice to know DSL is still alive. It's been stagnant for many years, isn't it? 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.
ngcc_hk 3y ago
Wonder whether it is easy to run this on m1/2 using qemu
ijhuygft776 3y ago
They need to rename it... drives aren't that much larger since DSL was 50mb
lemper 3y ago
when i visit the site, it says the the account is suspended. anyone else experiences the same problem or is it just me?
- mysterydip 3y ago
  Same here. Worked earlier, so I assume it was just the deluge of bandwidth consumption from news interest.
  - lemper 3y ago
    ah it's the classic hn hug of death. thanks for the answer.
ogogmad 3y ago
Account Suspended Please contact your hosting provider to correct issues causing your website to be offline.
gigatexal 3y ago
Website is offline :/
- jesterson 3y ago
  It's just too small :)

399 points by abbbi 3y ago

ape4 3y ago

A good choice to run a simple application in a container?

a_dabbler 3y ago
No, use Alpine for that

anthk 3y ago

I'd put this dillo fork: https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo 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.

snvzz 3y ago
gopherus is a decent, low resource, console-able, gopher client.
- anthk 3y ago
  sacc too; but felinks provides Gemini.

montroser 3y ago

I remember DSL fondly. It was a marvel then, and maybe now in retrospect even moreso -- that so much functionality could be packed into such a small footprint. Conceptually the need still exists today, even if the whole landscape has changed in the meantime. I'll look forward to trying this out!

alchemist1e9 3y ago

Fantastic to have another option with modern tools! great work that will be appreciated by many. Between this, Puppy, and Tiny Core Linux so much old hardware can be put to potential use. I’d also mention Finnix as an excellent rescue image solution. Any other awesome projects for limited hardware and Linux use that should be more well known?

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I'd say Alpine is in that category, and depending on how you count "Linux", OpenWrt too
seemaze 3y ago
I've been quite happy with Alpine Linux. You can build it up to suit your needs for desktop, server, embedded or containers, but will run quite speedily on any supported arch from a few tens of MB of memory. The APK package manager is pleasant and quick, and the package list is quite extensive.
- Atreiden 3y ago
  Wow I've never heard of someone running Alpine as a desktop OS before. How is the experience without glibc? What are you using for a DE? I'd thought X relied on glibc
  - dmwilcox 3y ago
    I've run musk based distro for a couple of years with no trouble (KISS Linux and now some hacked up Alpine monster I put together). I don't do streaming video that requires DRM -- which will be a non-starter due to the widevine/whatever plugins being compiled against glibc. 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).

anthk 3y ago

Also by using Musl and Alpine as a base the amount of software you can put in 700MB it's huge. 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.

znpy 3y ago
700mb used to host the whole ubuntu desktop for many years though
tutfbhuf 3y ago
I don't know if Musl is worth the hassle if one is only interested in the reduced size. I see the point if you have everything statically linked, but with dynamic linking, you have glibc sitting there just once with a few MB, and you don't have to tackle all the issues that can arise when using Musl (e.g., DNS). 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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I run Alpine on a desktop and a couple of laptops (low-end ex-chromebooks, one of them via postmarketos), and it's not really a hassle IME. Granted, I'm not doing a lot of building things from source (or if I do it's in docker and distro is easy to change) so maybe I'm just avoiding the pain, but if your uses are covered by officially packaged software it Just Works™.

lemme_tell_ya 3y ago

I played around with DSL a lot back in 2009 or so, it ran great on old PCs I salvaged from the garbage. > 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. https://www.slitaz.org/en/about/ https://www.slitaz.org/en/about/

ColonelPhantom 3y ago

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?

ls65536 3y ago
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 device being used there).
- mike_hock 3y ago
  That only fakes some cpuid flags. KVM cannot blacklist specific instructions or emulate idiosyncrasies of specific vintage CPUs.
  - ls65536 3y ago
    Yeah, that's a good point. As a further experiment, I tried with various "hardware" combinations (from 486's to Pentium II's) in 86Box, which actually performs such emulation, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get it to boot properly (kernel panics during initialization, if it gets that far at all).
  - anthk 3y ago
    You can run bare qemu without kvm, there's a fag to disable it.
npteljes 3y ago
It was an abandoned project for a long time, that's why the memory is old[0]. I remember because I was looking for something very light to boot up an old chunky armada laptop, and I ended up on Puppy Linux, even though I wanted to use DSL because of the cool name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux#Versions_and_ports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux#Versions_and_...

pushedx 3y ago

I used DSL back around when it was released (and 64 MiB flash drives were common) to get around my school's network filtering. I think this was one of the reasons they hired new IT staff the following year, because the technique caught on even with the non-nerdy crowd.

brnt 3y ago
Reminds me of cramming an installed QuakeII on a 64MB USB stick, and quickly booting it up on a few library computers when we had an hour off in high school. They blocked installers, but not 'portable' executables or network access.
montecarl 3y ago
Yes, this brings back such memories for me too! I also used to boot from removable media to use linux on school computers. The librarian assumed I was some kind of computer hacker and reported me to the schools IT admin. I thought I was in trouble. Instead he took me under his wing and had me work with him after school on some fun projects! Really helped me understand that the skills I was learning were valuable and that I had an aptitude for it.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Kudos to the admin, that’s a much better way to handle such a situation than what I’ve sadly read many stories about, where the IT dept seemingly takes mild cleverness by students as a personal insult and punishes them.

systems_glitch 3y ago

Cool! DSL replaced LNX-BBC for me some time in 2005. Glad to see development has resumed. In a similar vein, I think there's a Slackware-based release of Slax again! (posting this from a ThinkPad T61 running Slackware 15)

metalspot 3y ago

> keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills 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.

tw04 3y ago
>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".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
anthk 3y ago
Building and shipping new machines requires far more envionmental related costs.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Plus just earning the money to buy the new hardware is bad enough.
  - makerdiety 3y ago
    So, for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards? Stop working and stuff?
    - fuzzfactor 3y ago
      >for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards? 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.

bachmeier 3y ago

I just checked Wikipedia, and was surprised to see the original DSL only had releases for about 3.5 years. > 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.

anthk 3y ago
50MB for a pocket OS was perfecly small. Compare it to a 6-7-8 CD release of SuSE, Debian or Mandrake. Or the 700MB Knoppix CD back in the day. You could download DSL in reasonable time.
maxmalkav 3y ago
IIRC 50MB was not the space needed in RAM but the size of the whole basic installation on disk
pimlottc 3y ago
I remember running Linux Router Project [0] on a 1.44mb floppy disk back in the late 90s! Of course, it didn't have a GUI, but I don't think you could even fit the linux kernel on a single floppy disk today. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project
- fs_tab 3y ago
  Technically, you can compile the 6.8 kernel using "make tinyconfig" (which results in a 509kb image). Of course, this isn't usable on actual hardware, but it is a good baseline to build off.
- mobilio 3y ago
  In 2000 i was using FloppyFW for same reason.
  - pimlottc 3y ago

lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago

The "damn small" linux has 2 windows managers and 3 browsers. Doesn't look like it's small, looks like it's a collection of things the author enjoys.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
And how much space do those packages take?
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
  Take 3x what they could take.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Not really; the 3 browsers are dillo, links2, and badwolf. Of those, dillo and links2 are <10MB each including dependencies, while badwolf uses webkit which AFAICT is on the order of ~100MB. It's not practical to only have dillo or links2, so what it "could" take is >100MB for one browser, or >120MB for 3, and 120 is less than 3x100.
nlunbeck 3y ago
> All the applications are chosen for their functionality, small size, and low dependencies 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.
warner25 3y ago
I also raised an eyebrow at the three web browsers, but then I was thinking that it's quite likely that none of them are reliable for opening a modern webpage, so users might have to routinely try more than one. 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.

kotaKat 3y ago

Holy fucking shit my childhood. 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.

gorjusborg 3y ago

Wow, this submission has fantastic timing for me. 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.

ravenstine 3y ago

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.

codethief 3y ago
Are you looking to build just a minimal kernel or also a minimal distribution? (Which is what I happened to be thinking about last night :)) In the latter case, do you know any good resources about that topic?
- akkartik 3y ago
  Depending on how minimal a distribution you want, a few years ago I had a way to take a single ELF binary created by my computing stack built up from machine code (https://github.com/akkartik/mu https://github.com/akkartik/mu) and package it up with just a linux kernel and syslinux (whatever _that_ is) to create a bootable disk image I could then ship to a cloud server (https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode, though I don't use Linode anymore these days) and run on a VPS to create a truly minimal webserver. If this seems at all relevant I'd be happy to answer questions or help out.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Yocto, Linux From Scratch (LFS) and buildroot for embedded systems come to mind. https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/
- eKKiM 3y ago
  Some resources i used in the past are Linux From Scratch https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ and Yocto https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.yoctoproject.org/ However i have no idea how up to date these are.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Downloading at ~100KB/s... hitting the front page of HN is probably a good usecase for bittorrent.

meonkeys 3y ago
Mine went fast. Happy to share: 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.txt https://damnsmalllinux.org/download/dsl-2024.alpha.iso.md5.t... (looks like they only have an MD5 checksum posted).

ctrlaltdylan 3y ago

What a throwback. 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.

foxmoss 3y ago

Love this distro, its the only one that loads fast on web x86 emulation. Sad that they're upping the size but 700mb is still leagues smaller then most other distros.

cromka 3y ago

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.

glenstein 3y ago
A different way of saying the same thing: business-card sized and shaped.
- throwaway71271 3y ago
  those used to make the most horrible noise when you actually use them
  - robinsonb5 3y ago
    They weren't too great with vertically mounted drives or slot-loading drives, either.
    - sitzkrieg 3y ago
      they werent too great period :)
    - mikepurvis 3y ago
      I feel like slot loading drives were kind of a later thing, though— I only ever saw them in cars until after the Nintendo Wii in 2006. Other than the iMac, computer drives always had trays.
      - ngcc_hk 3y ago
        Apple like to suck.
  - myself248 3y ago
    Only if you had one of those fancy high-speed drives. They were nice and quiet at 2x.

haunter 3y ago

A truly damn small Linux is the xwoaf rebuild project 4.0 https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html >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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that's very dated

vardump 3y ago
"2.1mb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo" 2.1 MB installed? The ISO file seemed to be just 1716224 bytes (1.7MB).
- haunter 3y ago
  I was checking the final version (xwoaf_rebuild4.iso), that is 2205696 bytes
moffkalast 3y ago
So uh, who's gonna be first to get it running on a Pi Pico?
- vardump 3y ago

chrsw 3y ago

I like Fluxbox, it's really simple and doesn't get in your way.

urbandw311er 3y ago

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

robinsonb5 3y ago
Is there anything newer that isn't absurdly bloated?
- da_chicken 3y ago
  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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

signa11 3y ago

high-end CPUs have more cache than that !

Narishma 3y ago
Which high-end CPUs have 700 MB of cache?
- signa11 3y ago
  whoops sorry! i thought it was still around 50m or thereabouts…
- ukuina 3y ago
  AMD's EPYC Milan-X was announced a couple years ago with 768MB of L3 cache.

l33tman 3y ago

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 back then either. But Linux then was really a breakthrough compared to the horrible mess of embedded OSes that were needed otherwise to handle TCP/IP, filesystems and multitasking.

xattt 3y ago
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.
- l33tman 3y ago
  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 :)

Dwedit 3y ago

For those who had to search it, "Badwolf" is a Webkit based browser.

ukuina 3y ago
Thanks, I was wondering if it was related to New Who.

sylware 3y ago

badwolf... light?? It is a webkit based browser, come on...

tbitrust 3y ago

What are some use cases of Damn Small Linux?

harvie 3y ago

666 MB iso

ryzvonusef 3y ago

thank you for sharing, but surprised they are offering a direct download link instead of a torrent, they are bound to get slashdotted.

lelandbatey 3y ago

Damn small Linux was the first Linux I could actually use as a child/adolescent because the downloaded zip file included a copy of QEMU.exe (and a .BAT file to boot DSL) that I could use to get a taste of Linux with no prior experience, using a Windows computer. Growing up in Redmond WA, home of Microsoft, it felt very subversive to young me to use a non-windows operating system. I'm forever thankful for that seemingly random include in the download; I probably wouldn't have become the person I am without it.

veganjay 3y ago

I was looking for a lightweight OS to run on old Asus Eee PC 1005 HA, which uses a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 processor. I installed Void Linux (https://voidlinux.org/ https://voidlinux.org/). I may give DSL 2024 a try and see how it compares.

anthk 3y ago
N270, I use Hyperbola with CWM+UXterm+ CLI/TUI software except mupdf, sxiv and mpv. SBCL and Vis it's my "IDE". It runs pretty snappy.
catherinecodes 3y ago
Void Linux is great for minimal installs. Gentoo fits the bill nicely too. Both allow for small init systems and, at least in the case of Gentoo, multiple bootloaders and initramfs tools.
isr 3y ago
VoidPup may also pique your interest. It's a puppy linux build using void packages & the xbps package manager. 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.

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago

Great memories of the original DSL. New one looks great at a glance, really nice collection of applications. Blown away they managed to fit all that on a CD. From the page, it sounds like they did a lot of work to make it happen. Really cool stuff. Might stick this on an old laptop when I get home.

mrighele 3y ago

> 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).

netdoll 3y ago
If I had to wager a guess, probably something like labwc would end up in that role for a distro of DSL's scope and philosophy. However, I think we're still a while away from that, and for the targeted machines, X is still completely fine and will remain so for a long while.

flykespice 3y ago

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.

crznp 3y ago

> Dillo (super-light GUI browser) See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613 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!

anta40 3y ago

Nice to know DSL is still alive. It's been stagnant for many years, isn't it? 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.

ngcc_hk 3y ago

Wonder whether it is easy to run this on m1/2 using qemu

ijhuygft776 3y ago

They need to rename it... drives aren't that much larger since DSL was 50mb

lemper 3y ago

when i visit the site, it says the the account is suspended. anyone else experiences the same problem or is it just me?

mysterydip 3y ago
Same here. Worked earlier, so I assume it was just the deluge of bandwidth consumption from news interest.
- lemper 3y ago
  ah it's the classic hn hug of death. thanks for the answer.

ogogmad 3y ago

Account Suspended Please contact your hosting provider to correct issues causing your website to be offline.

gigatexal 3y ago

Website is offline :/

jesterson 3y ago
It's just too small :)