DSL Talk

As an exercise in frustration I've been trying to resurect an old Compaq Armada 7790. I was running RedHat 7.3.(not all that well)
Found DSL from an article by someone who was doing the same thing. Once I installed it to hard drive I was hooked. This is the lightest and fastest OS I've used since I played with Oberon back in the day. It has made this Compaq usable again. I have even been playing with it on my big box. (AMD 2800 w/ 1 gig of ram. You should try that. It smokes!)
Back to the Compaq. The WavLan works flawlessly. I would like to get my other wireless card (an SMC) working. Not really having alot of luck with that but I'll keep trying.

For those of you who need to get DSL working from behind your company's proxy server, here's what worked for me......

edit the .bash_profile file in the /home/dsl directory (it's a hidden file, so if you're using emelfm, then you'll need to click on the "H" button to find it)
add these two lines after the first "export" statement in the file
export http_proxy='http://userid:password@proxy.yourcompanyserver.com:port'
export ftp_proxy='http://userid:password@proxy.yourcompanyserver.com:port'

save the file.
when you shut down the system the new version of the file will be written to the backup file, next time you reboot it will all be set for you.

I've been hooked on Damn Small for quite a while, since shortly after I first started playing around with Linux. (I remember the 0.7.x days pretty well, when my friend and I were trying to get an old 486 working...) I've used a lot of systems, I even maintain my own, but none has ever been more useful than Damn Small.

I bought a couple of Ebox IIs to see how they would boot DSL. They run on a Vortex86 200MHz All-in-One Single Board Computer with 128MB onboard DRAM.

I was really impressed with how small these things were, and they were able to boot DSL from either USB or from IDE. Really, it was a marvel to have DSL run on such tiny hardware.

Unfortunately, X and all the gui apps ran a little too slow for practical use, but I can see such a unit having all sorts of nifty local server applications.

Can I ask for help here?
Well.. anyway... Why ask if I'm going to....!

I just bought a pen drive today, and remembered DSL can save/restore settings on it... So I've downloaded DSL current (1.2.1 I think) and burn a CD. OK booted.. OK. Now I want to save my settings on my pen drive... I can mount it OK... /dev/sda1, I did a mke2fs -j /dev/sda1... OK ext3 FS on it... My guess is that I have to go to System -> Backup/Restore to save my settings... right? It asks for a device, I tried: /dev/sda, /dev/sda1, mounted it, /mnt/sda1, and It just hanged, I discovered that on tty1 it gives a msg like "Invalid device /dev/sda" for all my attempts... What am I missing here?

I am going to start trimming help questions in here. If you need help go to the IRC channel or, better yet, go to the forums.

It may be trivial to those of you who've been tide to something stronger/more dangerous, but today I am kicking caffeine out of my system.

It was getting ridiculous, to the point where I need 12 cups of coffee a day just to keep from getting a splitting headache. So, today I quite. I had my last cup 18 hours ago. I am doing all right so far, I'm just taking Tylenol for the headache and I've been wanting to sleep a lot.

I downloaded DSL at the office today and burned the bootable CD on my antique Dell computers. I booted DSL and loaded it all into RAM.. dang, even on my PII 366 that puppy was QUICK.

Loving this already and wanting extensions I sent my lovely assistant ( the company owner actually ) to get me a 1GB USB stick. They didn't carry them so she got me a 512M stick.

Took all my toys home and plugged in the memory stick into the antique ( PII 400 ) Dell Laptop and lit it off.

Problem #1 I want /home to be on the USB stick.. hmmm hack or post to the DSL site ?

Problem #2 Maybe put the whole shebang on the USB stick and save all my data there but I'd have to boot into WinBlow$ first ..