My Workstation OS: Damn Small Linux

I have heard a lot of good things about this distro, Damn Small Linux. But I am curious as to how easy it is to get configured. I was also a little turned off by the news that the ’support group’ can be a little snooty. That is a shame.

Damn Small Linux is much more than the business-card LiveCD that it originated as. It is a desktop computing powerhouse. DSL boasts an impressive and useful software collection while maintaining a slim 50MB footprint. It offers several options to run or boot the system along with simple configuration. Top it all off with a custom extension system, as well as apt-get, and you can begin to see why DSL is my workstation GNU/Linux distribution.

I run DSL on an old Pentium II with 128MB of RAM. With every new release I reinstall the operating system to the hard drive, which admittedly kind of sucks, but since my initial install I have began saving most everything to CD-RW. Running from LiveCD would make the update process easier, or eliminate it all together, but I must put my old 1.2GB hard drive to use somehow.

DSL’s default window manager is the ultra efficient Fluxbox. It’s lightweight, very customizable, and a perfect match for DSL. No, it doesn’t include all the bells and whistles of KDE or GNOME, but the minimalist approach is beneficial to some. I now run Fluxbox on every desktop I use for the added performance benefit.

Want apps? Dig this. DSL includes Beaver for text editing and Xpaint for basic image manipulation. It contains Flwriter, a tiny but useful word processor, as well as equally necessary Word and PDF viewers. You can listen to your MP3 collection or stream audio from the Web with XMMS. All the Internet access applications, including Telnet, FTP, and VNCviewer, are there too. You can browse the Web with Dillo or Links, chat with clients for IRC, ICQ, and AOL Instant Messenger, and exchange email with Sylpheed. [Read the rest]