TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I was introduced to Damn Small Linux some time ago by that wonderful Linux matchmaker Distrowatch.com. 

The version I first played with was 0.6 something and I was impressed.  Damn Small packs a whole lot of Linux features into a package small enough to only fill up half of one of those business card CDRs (and that's the idea). Overall it's suprisingly full featured, if not at all meant for newbies. 

Install:

Since it's a LiveCD and I have yet to test the harddrive install feature (it does have one), I'll talk more about the boot sequence here. Damn Small uses the Knoppix boot program to detect and configure all your hardware.

I have yet to find a system that gives it detection problems.  You have the chance at boot to pass Damn Small one or more boot options (displayed by F2).  My favorite is the "toram" option, which loads the entire contents of the CD to your system memory and speeds everything up to near real-time. 

With Knoppix and Mepis (full-sized LiveCDs) this requires that you have at least 1GB of RAM.  With Damn Small you can load the entire CD with just over 128MB, which makes it run fast even on those dinosaurs in your garage. 

The entire boot/detection/configuration process takes less than 5 minutes and you're greeted by a Blackbox window manager.  This may seem a bit daunting to people who haven't used it before and like icons. 

For those people there is an option in the main menu (right click to get a menu) called "Full enhanced desktop" that add icons, a system monitor/mount monitor and a multiple desktop viewer.  Enjoy.

Package Selection:

As I mentioned before, Damn Small packs an awful lot of useful things into a very very tiny package.  Just perusing through the menus makes you wonder how they got it all in there. 

Included features are multiple web browsers (more on that later), instant messaging client, Secure Shell Login, mini Web server (you heard me), Xterminals, Email program, a classic Nintendo game emulator with collection of 8 legal ROM games, the X Mulitimedia Player (XMMS) with the built in ability to stream net music, PDF viewer, word processor, and the usual gamut of Linux administrator utilities.

More on the web browser thing.  The default graphical web browser (yes there are text ones) is Dillo. It very small and to the point, supports basic frames but not CSS as far as I know. 

There's also one really cool feature that I don't think was in the previous version. Hidden at the bottom of your "Apps->Net->Browser" menu is an option called "got the bandwidth?". 

Inside is a link to Mozilla Firefox.  What the link does is download a version of Firefox and load it into your RAM.  I do have the bandwidth and it took me about 6 minutes to have a fully functioning Firefox browser on my Damn Small desktop. Very geeky cool.

Most Annoying Feature:

I'm really having to get picky here since Damn Small is a tight little distro with not a lot I can complain about.  One strange thing that happened when I first booted was an error message that said: "Error: Only one processor found." 

Now while I'm sure Damn Small is meant to be a sysadmin's last line of defense on a broken server or something, I couldn't help but be mildly offended by this comment.

Some of us Linux addicts don't have the money for a dual or *gasp* multi-processor system and I don't need some tiny Linux distro reminding me of that fact! 

Other than that very small annoyance, everything in Damn Small seems to work as advertised.  I didn't mess with the web server aspect so I can't comment on how easy/hard/bang your head into a wall it was.

Who's it best for?

As I mentioned above, this is not a newbie distro.  Although in theory since it's a LiveCD and you aren't destroying anything a newbie with low bandwidth might consider it just to play around. 

I think this distro is best as a "keep in your wallet" distro for Linux gurus and administrators who need a "quick fix" for themselves or a server since it will get you up and running in a minimal desktop environments and give you Vi or nano to edit a configuration file or read a log (and stream some ambient techno music while doing it).

I for one am going to look for some cheap business card CDRs just to put this distro on it and maybe distribute it among my coworkers (particularly the guys in the Oracle dungeon).