TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Damn Small is another one of those quirky distros that I just had to try when I saw it. It's a Live CD based distribution using the startup/hardware detection scripts from Knoppix.

The thing that makes it different from any other LiveCD Knoppix ripoff is that the whole thing is just 48 megabytes. This whole distribution could fit on a business card-sized CDR (a point that is made clearly on the website).

Install:

Installation basically consists of you booting with the CD, pressing enter or throwing it some special parameters (i have a lot of RAM so I told it to load the whole cd into RAM with knoppix toram) and watch as the pretty little Knoppix script autodetects your hardware. In around 5 minutes you have a fully functional yet very very small Linux OS.

Package Selection:

in theory this distro uses the TAR.GZ package system which basically means there is no package management. also, since this is a LiveCD distro, you won't be changing the package selection anyway unless you decide to throw caution to the wind and install it on your hard drive with their unsupported install script.

Knoppix has something similar (I daresay identical) and I haven't been able to get either of them to work correctly. my advice: let a LiveCD distro remain a LiveCD distro. don't try and install it because it wasn't meant to be and it won't install correctly anyway.

Damn Small contains instant messenger capability with Naim, web browsing with Dillo, text editing with Ned and Nano (my personal favorite), and the whole thing is presented with a modified version of the Fluxbox window manager. It's simple, to the point, and not very pretty. But then, it's 48 MB. what do you expect, animated teddy bears?

Most Annoying Feature:

For once I really don't have a lot of negative to say about a distro. it doesn't require an install, its hardware detection did very well even with my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro that seems to make most Linuxes go into fits, and there's just enough software to be useful without being bloated (read: Redhat).

The only thing I would improve is the install script that never quite seems to work correctly, because this would be a great candidate for my little 1GB Quantum Fireball hard drive that has been sitting in disuse for 2 years since I gutted it from a garage somewhere inside an IBM Aptiva from 1993.

Who's it best for?

Since it's not real pretty I don't recommend damn small linux for linux newbies. it's designed for the Linux Veteran who wants to carry a little piece of home in his wallet, and for that it does a stellar job. If you want to get a friend of yours to try out Linux in all its glory, throw them a Knoppix or Gnoppix LiveCD. They're much prettier and have lots of bells and whistles to astound the average Windoze crony.