DSL Talk

Long Story...
Every year my wife and I host a St. Patrick's day party. I am in charge of the music.

First came records, and I was stuck next to the turntable (nobody else was allowed to touch my Thorens or later, my Rega).

Then came cassettes, and I would let someone else change them. But they all had to be recorded first.

Then came CDs, and someone else could change them too. A 5-disk Sony changer made it easier to mix the music without needing to record cassettes for hours and hours.

But when we moved to Texas and went all networked and wireless, I started my quest for the ultimate, streaming, synchronized system. This search is still on, but that's another story.

I won't lie. I've had tulmultus affairs with many OS's over my thirty years of life. Starting with the Vic 20 and Apple and then the Commodore c64. I've been with DOS and all her sisters and cousins and children. I've dallied with OS/2 and diddled with AmigaOS and every variant windows I can imagine.

But beyond some old school CLI Unix commands over a telnet connection through a pirated copy of procomm plus when in the late 80's and Early ninties, I have never really diddled with Unix, Linux or any of their thousands of stepchildren.

Until now.

DSL blew me away. Really. AFter losing my computers in two hurricanes I was relegated to an old IBM Thinkpad 600e running win98 at 333mhz on a pentium II. It was a huge step down and while I have come to love the old girl, Windows bog down something feirce. So I went searching tho net and came across DSL. Intrigued, I burned an ISO on an old 210mb PocketCDR at my ex father in law's house and VIOLA, a minute after booting it on the thinkpad I was in love.

OK... you've got a Frugal install of DSL on some old piece of hardware and it's sitting in the corner just chugging away.

Great.

Then you decided to make it a Samba server by downloading the Samba.dsl and now it can be accessed by the windows boxes.

Great.

Then you wanted it to be a beefed up web server and FTP server so you added Xampp ( Xampp website ).

Great.

Maybe you're lucky enough to have a webcam that linux can use and you've also made the box into a webcam server with the motion.dsl download.

Great.

There may be other ways to do this, but a small Linux, like DSL is the most available, and the easiest. An operating system on a pendrive gives you a super data-secure method of building an inexpensive, small computer for internet use and basic office tasks. It's secure because you can take, not only your newly created data, but your entire operating system away with you separately from your machine. It's also a great hobbiest's OS because it's flexible and free. Here's what I did with it recently.
Also, DSL and the mini-itx form factor just seem to go together like apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Take a look at this article.

I am a Windows orphan... a laptop that once ran on 95, once my Pentium 1 and 64mb RAM was top of the range, but now, nobody wants to know me.

In an attempt to obtain Nirvana, I sat under a google space and I saw flashing lights. One of it said Damn Small Linux.

My last straw at reincarnation. I downloaded the .iso and booted on my CD. It's so unfair... others have fancy windows and my is a poor Dos like interface. What have I done wrong.

Not quite weaned from Windows, I did one thing I knew...I pressed Enter. The machine started flinging words and numbers at me... and then it started autoconfiguing my hardware... I had my CD, my floppy, my pcmcia slot with a Socket Ethernet card... and then the autoconfiguration stopped.

Hey,

Having discovered DSL only recently, I have decided to embark on installing it on my w800i's memory card. I am compiling my own image, including openoffice and thunderbird, and hopefully will be able to boot it straight off my USB connected phone.

Wish me luck and i'll let you know how it goes.

andy

I was pretty pleased with myself for getting the 486 up and running - although this was pretty short lived when I found that I had no network. I could see that DSL recognised the NIC a DLink DE-220P and started the eth0 service, but I couldn't get a network connection. Even the ADSL modem/router wasn't recognising the box.

Googling on linux and DLink DE-220P showed that this card was supported, good news but not helpful.

After mucking around with the control panel and anything vaguely related to network setup (none of which was any good) I looked in the System Stats button, and the DMESG tab showed that the NIC was being recognised (IRQ5), but also NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out.

Ok...well things are moving along.....slowly. I have installed a wireless pci card (atheros chip) in my k-6 desktop, and it is up and running. The AT&T card is up and running on the lapptop. Still need to install the Motorolla USB adapter on the windows box. I have configured the two machines up and running but can't get them to talk. I'm kind of stumbling along blindly here but so far I have;

- ifconfig ath0 up
- ifconfig ath0 xxx.xx.xx.xx (ip)
- ifconfig ath0 mode ad-hoc
- ifconfig ath0 rate 11MB
- iwconfig ath0 essid pluto

Now I go to either machine and type

iwlist ath0 peers.........and get no scan results

i'm gonna put together a DSL wireless as-hoc network. been wanting to do this for a while, and now is the time.i'm going to network 3 machines, may even try samba with my winblows box later. my 3 machines are as follows;

1- Desktop 850mhz duron, 256mb ram, 160gb hd, dualbooting w2k and DSL liveCD

2- Desktop 350mhz K-6, 64mb ram, 8gb hd, booting DSL hd install

3- Laptop 400mhz celeron, 192mb ram, 10gb hd, booting DSL frugal

3 different machines, 3 different installs...should be interesting, or impossible, we will see.

will try and keep the blog updated, no promises though........

Just solved a problem on a 486DX2/66 16MB. I had carried out an HD install, but could not get it to boot completely into X. The problem was I had created a swap partition with cfdisk but hadn't mkswap'd or swapon'd it. (I guess that means I hadn't formatted it or turned it on).

The commands I'd missed out were -

mkswap /dev/hda1
swapon /dev/hda1

If you are doing a hd install then see this page

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_to_the_Hard_Disk

as well as following the instructions in Dillo.