Don't have time to play like that anymore, and I kind of miss it. I'd be interested in hearing your experiences (no, I'm not affiliated, I just think that Damn Small Linux rocks!) Oh, and it pretty much installs and runs itself. Installation is easy - there's a script in the image that is really easy to run thru, all you need to know is what partition it needs to be on.
To boot DSL requires only 8 mb ram if you're willing to deal with a lot of HD swap.
You don't need a CDrom, either - if you can get the 50mb image on the hard drive, even if it's in a DOS partition, you can boot it from a DSL boot floppy, or with tomsrblt you can boot it over NFS if the network card is supported (takes a little tweaking tho in some configs)ĭSL boots with fluxbox and a fb X and even on my 486 33mhz laptop is quite usable (I use the 486 to monitor the big machines from bed and surf slashdot occasionally :)ĭSL is also quite nice for doing chroot to a debian install without having to go thru the crap of loading floppies - read the howtos there (too long to get into in this post)īTW, none of the machines I've used DSL on have more than 16mb ram - more helps, but it's very usable without them, as long as you aren't using modern browsers (ram-hungry) or things like Open Office.
Works pretty well (just doesn't update well, it's a mix of Debian stable, unstable and testing - so one has to be careful :) (see below) It's a massively shrunken (50 mb image) version of Knoppix which is geared for min memory and cpu - and still has the hardware autodetect. That said, for a lot of older systems, you might try Damn Small Linux - which I use on my 486 laptop and which works quite well. I'm biased - that's how I did it - but hey :) Think of it as an education - in frustration - which is often the best teacher *grin* but seriously, sometimes just doing install after install on various machines is the best way to learn it. Before I moved I had tons of old equipment around, and that's how I learned to do stuff. If I'd known you were looking I'd have just shipped it to you (didn't get enough money to pay for my time, only about fifty bucks) I just sold a 8 lb box of 486/PI/II ram - a lot from prop machines like IBMs and gateways - on ebay. And getting after market RAM sticks is extremely cost prohibitive, and a lot of these older machines take very precise sticks