DSL Talk

Q) I'm from and my keyboard is messed up! How can I fix it?!

A) Easy! At the "boot: " prompt type in "dsl lang=##" (without the quotes).

Just replace "##" with the 2 letter code for your language.

Known languages that work are:

"es" - Spanish
"fr" - French
"de" - German
"fi" - Finnish

These may work, but have not been "officially" tested. The keymaps are in /usr/share/keymaps/. If something has a "(?)" beside it, it means I wasn't really sure what the language was, so I made an educated guess. If I'm wrong, email me and I'll fix it. If it has a "???" beside it, even Google couldn't help me. If you know what language it is, go ahead and fix it.

---Before you begin---

Make sure that CD-ROM (or USB if you are using a USB pendrive) booting is enabled and before the hard disk in the boot order. For USB, you may have options such as "usb-zip", "usb-floppy", and "usb-hdd". Just experiment until you find the one that works for you. You may also need to enable USB keyboard support, for some boards.

If your board is not capable of booting from CD-ROM (or USB), you will need to make a Boot floppy! Just head over to one of the mirrors and grab the latest boot-x.x.x.img (or boot-usb-x.x.x.img). It should be in the "current/" directory.

In linux, you can create a boot floppy by typing

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The operators of this website will not be held responsible for any incidents involving the use of ideas or programs demostrated or supplied by using this website.

That being said, enjoy DSL.

There are some advantages to buying DSL from the main DSL website.

It helps save time and takes out a lot of the confusion people run into when attempting to install DSL by themselves. It also helps ensure that DSL continues to be provided and improved upon.

You can buy DSL preinstalled on a USB key/pen drive or other USB/cf devices, and from the main site even purchase a full scale DSL mini-machine, or donate.

This is the description I also post over at Wikipedia, but I consider this the master copy.
It will be kept more up to date than the one at Wikipedia.

---Intro to DSL---

Damn Small Linux (also known as DSL) is a Linux distribution for the x86 architecture, originally in a Bootable business card LiveCD format, it is now also capable of being installed to and run from the hard disk, a USB flash drive, a Compact Flash card, inside a Microsoft Windows or Linux host environment via Qemu, a ZIP drive, and just about any other bootable media that can contain the required 50MB. Although the DSL project has maintained its 50mb size limit, it still includes many essential desktop applications. Damn Small Linux was originally conceived and maintained by John Andrews, but has grown into a large community project with many contributors, most notably Robert Shingledecker for the creation of the MyDSL system, DSL Control Panel, and tons of other stuff.

Well, it's official. I have just completed remastering NCLB Linux to a DSL base. When you start over from scratch, you realize how much tweaking you have done in the past! I hope to wait quite awhile until have to start from scratch again! I used DSL version 0.9.1 as my remaster base so I hope nothing TOO COOL happens to the DSL base in the next several releases. :)

All my installs will be from frugal. I have made alot of little modifications to make the OS specific to my cause so many things are 'hard-coded' into the OS like having to have an /hda1 and /hda5 partition. At first I tried to avoid that but then again I knew I was only using this remaster for one specific purpose so I decided to take that route. Basically the image and backup.tar.gz will reside on hda1 while a data partion will reside on /hda5. I added commands to bootlocal so that a 'MyDocumnents' folder is created in /home/dsl, permissioned to dsl staff and mounted in fstab on /hda5. I also documented all the configuration files from all the apps that are created in /home/dsl and added them to filetool.lst so any personal settings/game scores/etc can be saved and restored. I have tried to automate as much as possible because I know that other NFP's like mine will be interested in this software and I want to try and minimize the learning curve for them to install.

This is the first step in preparing to install DSL.

There are a variety of ways to get DSL, many of which may be explored on the main DSL website. For simplicity's sake we're going to assume you just want to get the files you will need to install DSL onto a CD, USB key, Hard Drive, or some other USB Device.

In the following documents you will be referred to DSL images (ie. bootusb-x.x.img & dsl-x.x.x.iso). These are the actual images you will need to install DSL to media.

At the time of this writing is the latest DSL version supported by these FAQs.

You can always visit the main DSL website to find the latest mirrors and such to get your hands on a copy of DSL.

Ok, I'm having fun with this:

I have a squashfs.o that works in DSL 0.9.1, and will continue to work until DSL runs under a new kernel. It DOES NOT REQUIRE A NEW KERNEL. That's right. It's just a module, and you can plug it in just like any other module.

mksquashfs seems to work just fine with no extra libs.

I'm working on an experimental proof-of-concept design for a SquashFS DSL module. It will have all the benefits of both .dsl and .uci extensions, along with a feature stolen from .deb packages, but will not occupy much RAM at all.

Essentially, it gets mounted like a uci. Since the package for this is (and has to be) a dsl, mkwriteable is already run. Once the module is mounted, it is linked into the root filesystem, its user.tar extracted into your home dir, and /sdmrc run (the feature stolen from .deb packages - controlscripts). It also has /etc/init.d/sdm-config and /etc/rc5.d/S02sdm-config linking to that - ensuring that you can have .sdm - type modules on a liveCD.