DSL Talk

Recently I was experimenting around with some other very small Linux systems. I was given an opportunity to 'play' with an old Toshiba T4700ct notebook, which is a 486 running from a 320 megabyte hard drive and a whopping 8 megs or ram! THere is no Cdrom, thus all things needed to come from floppy, so I downloaded Basic Linux BL3 and proceeded. Now, I am not superbly adept at Linux and every new experience is both troublesome and rewarding. Uusally, I run into a stump or two right off the bat, and this time was no different. Firstly, I could not get 'x' to work. Apparently, dos 6.22 'interferes' with BL3 being able to read rom, so the Toshiba has to be started by pressing the alt-f5 buttons to bypass the autoexe.bat and config.sys files at boot. After doing that I got 'x' to work. Then I needed to edit some files. I had never had any luck editing files and the reason is something I think ALL NEWBIES need to be told. In fact, I think the designers of the Pico Editor need to revamp the format or at least make things CLEAR. In order to use the commands in Pico the help files say to press ^x or ^XY or so on. I had tried pressing ^ANYTHING for several months before this--all to no avail. Secondly the ^ sign is a CAPITAL 6 on the keyboard and pressing ^ and any other key is almost impossible , much less TWO keys as the Pico help guide instructs. I just so happened to be checking how to edit pppsetup and a Slackware guide mentioned that the ^ sign meant to push the CONTROL button!! Well, for crying out loud!! Why,, WHY isn't that the CLEAR instructions in the Pico editor??!! Sure enough, I pressed CONTROL x and VIOLA--I got Pico to WORK for the VERY FIRST time EVER! I can honestly say that the Linux fanatics that holler about how 'easy' Linux is to use could stand to learn from this lesson. This was one of the most confusing issues I have faced in the Linux world yet. And ,it is WAAAy to simple to have been overcome in the beginning by responsible programming. The ^ sign is NOT the CONTROL button. So, I hope this might help other users who read this.

I use both the live cd version 2.0 and the embedded version which runs in Qemu on my Windows XP machine. Both are just great additions to my software collections and do just what I need them to do and do it VERY well. My machine is an AMD 1800 Athlon w/ a 1.5 gig processor and 256 meg memory, v.i.a chips and onboard video. The speed at which dsl runs is fantastic. I am connected to the net with dsl,, thus I am running DSL with DSL lol. The Qemu embedded version runs just as quick as any dial-up I have ever used and very frequently faster than that. I do not do much other than surf the web and write e-mails and make documents so this package takes me waaaay past where I need to go and has the added advantage of being snoop free. Dillo is a small and LIGHTNING fast browser and this is a boon to me as I like to view several topics from a webpage and I can have them loading in new tabs while speedreading and things go VERY quickly. There is no java with Dillo, but I do not miss it since I am reading text for the most part and the pure SPEED is just flat exhilirating! Firefox 1.0 is also included in dsl 2.0 live cd ( I am writing this comment from it ) and it is also right speedy, plus it will load all the pretty pictures and so forth. Damn Small Linux has always found ALL my hardware and loaded into useable form in a minimal amount of time in EVERY computer I tried it on. It is EASY to use, and after trying 14 other distros , mostly live cd's, over a period of 8 months, this one gets both my thumbs up and a couple raised fists as well.