TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

It's been a while since I've played with Damn Small. The last time I used it regularly was on an old Gateway Solo laptop someone at work dumped on me. The fact that I could run a new OS (however small) on an ancient Pentium 3 with 16MB of RAM was a testament to its usefulness.

I'm curious to see what improvements have been made over the last couple of versions, and whether or not I can justify carrying around a wallet-sized CD-R of it again. (Yes, I am that geeky.)

Install:

The first thing I noticed when I booted the LiveCD was that there has been a bit of a visual upgrade since the last time I played with this distribution. I don't remember there being a proper taskbar at the bottom of the screen. It's a nice touch.

DSL was designed to run off a LiveCD, so naturally the program to install it on your harddrive isn't their top priority. It shows. You have to know your way around cfdisk to pre-partition your harddrive before you can run the installer.

Once that step is done, however it's mostly just simple questions. You pick whether you want multi-user login (the default is to give you one auto-login user named "dsl"), whether you want GRUB or LILO (I chose GRUB), and that's it.

On first reboot you're prompted for your root and user passwords. Once all that was configured, I rebooted.

I was impressed by the boot time. I counted 22 seconds from GRUB prompt to desktop. Just to give you a comparison, Ubuntu 7.10 takes roughly 1 minute 30 seconds to start up for me. That's a significant speed difference. Of course, Ubuntu has a lot more stuff to load.

Thanks to the little resource monitor widget on the top right corner of the desktop I was able to take a look at how much RAM and other resources were being used. DSL has always been pretty efficient, and this release was no exception. 50 MB when idle is pretty svelte in our age of gigabytes of RAM.

MPG movies played, but MOV/WMV did not. My test MP3 sounded quite...interesting. Ever played an old cassette tape too many times and the whole thing sounds like it's being played in slow motion? Yeah, that's what it sounded like.

Software Selection:

Due to its emphasis on "small," DSL has made some interesting substitutions for common applications. Firefox is present. In place of GIMP or something similar is XPaint. Naim replaces Pidgin (it's a console IM client that looks like IRC chat).

There are several text editors both command-line (Vim, Nano) and otherwise (Murga Lua FLTK Editor). That last one wins the award for worst named X application of the year as far as I'm concerned.

Looking through the office menu, I stumbled upon a word processing app I'd never heard of: Ted. It has some interesting visuals. After the...unique introduction screen it looked like a fairly standard word processor, even if it's only able to save in TXT or RTF.

XMMS is the multimedia app of choice, and I've always been fond of it. Too bad it didn't have any of the codecs I wanted. Java and GCC were also absent, not that I was particularly surprised. The JVM itself would have taken up another 50MB of space.

Ace of Penguins is the sole game, but it provides several card games, Taipei, Minesweeper, Mastermind, and oh hell, just take a look for yourself.

If you're feeling like the selection is a little sparse (and have an internet connection), there's a little tool called MyDSL Extensions that might help. It offers options for several apps you can download and install.

Conclusion:

DSL is usually my first choice for old computers, since it has a very small footprint and offers most of the tasks everyday users need out of the box (minus multimedia). It will continue to be my choice for this.

However, because of its very nature it's not going to be on my desktop any time soon. With internet, it's a small, quick Debian base to start with. Without, it's only really useful to me for administrative tasks performed from a LiveCD.