Damn Small Linux 3.2 RC1 review

Damn Small Linux is a business card size (50MB) bootable Live CD Linux distribution

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 51042K Developer: Damn Small Linux Team

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Damn Small Linux is a business card size (50MB) bootable Live CD Linux distribution. Despite its minuscule size, Damn Small Linux strives to have a functional and easy to use desktop.

Having a working Linux desktop distro on a 50 mb bootable business card CD is just too cool not to do.

Damn Small Linux has a nearly complete desktop, including XMMS (MP3, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, links web browser, FireFox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), a word-processor (FLwriter), four editors (Beaver, nVi, Zile [emacs clone], and Nano [Pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf, emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript printer support, NFS, Fluxbox window manager, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and pcmcia support, some wireless support.

If you like DSL you can install it on your hard drive. Because all the applications are small and light it makes a very good choice for older hardware.

Originally DSL was based on model_k, which did an excellent distillation of Knoppix down to 33 megabytes. But more recent versions are a reduction from Knoppix proper.

As many know Knoppix is based on Debian which really made my task a lot easier, but the applications on the CD are not pure Debian. I am using a few apps that are not available via apt-get.