User Feedback :: Is DSL the one?
One both the Wiki and the Main Site promote DSL as a liveCD.
In fact the history of DSL is a live boot business card cd. That is even on our logo.
Two, I would consider the poll to be skewed towards the obvious, which is the prevailing mindset of "I got a cd, now I need to install it to the hard drive."
My colloquial use of the term "Not your Father's Operating System' is not meant to offend. Unix systems have as most other OS since the 1960's have run that way. My use of this term is to make people think of alternate ways that deploy newer technologies And promote what DSL does have to offer. Yes, there is a learning curve. Yes it absolutely bucks the prevailing mindset. We wouldn't have this thread if it weren't so.
It indeed may be time to remove this feature from DSL. As it is, it just happened to work from the then version of Knoppix. It has not been touched much at all over three years. It still trys to detect all the hardware upon each boot up, rebuilds fstab, etc. It is acknowledged that is is very dated. But it is also acknowledged that is it not the focus of DSL. Given all the heat about this library and that library, about oldstable, etc., it may not be worth the hassle.
In fact, I and others will often direct a user looking a small Debian installler to use the one from Debian group.
The libraries needed to run the application that come with DSL are the only ones needed. We will not grow this distro with extra libraries for may be needed future apps. We will not update and bloat grow either when not necessary.
We have a mechanism in place called MyDSL just for that sort of thing.
If you have an old machine uncapable of running the large full size distros and happen to like DSL and just what it offers and if you wish to have a traditional hard drive install of a static system with possibly the use of UCI myDSL extensions, then that would be the only suitable situation that I would personally recommend. Maybe I should pop up a huge warning with just such a message?
Promotion of DSL to change course and become a Debain Installer is not going to happen. There is one already out there.
Just as there are hundreds of Linux distros designed to install to hard drive.
On the other hand, if want to learn, explore, and contribute to a community of Linux users exploring alternate ways to spread the revolution then by all means accept the challenge to learn of the many ways of DSL.
DSL works very good for me as is. Right now I am downloading an ISO, listening to classical music from an online radio station (In Peru) via XMMS (streaming mp3), and surfing a little bit before hitting the sack.
I have a bare 1.2 GB Quantumm Fireball HD (how old is that one!?) that I mount via emelfm and download files to via Firefox.
Yes, I use other os software, but for net stuff I generally use DSL.
All being done on an old HP Kayak PII 166!
"I'll pass on the bloat and chase the goat" with slender and trim DSL live CD (it's also installed to another HD for backup).
I am really loving this DSL thing.. i am currently tring to teach people about it.. i build an donate computers to poor people and i am gonna install it on all of them so that these people get thier first taste of computing with linux .. and DSL. I think it is great that you can customize your computer and then put it in your pocket and take it with you to someone elses box.. now i got to figure out how to get my lexmark to print.. ?? guess i'll post that elsewhere..
i forgot to mention.. DSL automatically reconizes all the components on my fancy new motherboard (the ONLY new peice of computer equip this trashpicker has ever owned) .. AND WINDOWS DOES NOT!! no sound!, no eth! not even a decent res! and i works on all my old trash boxes. most of which can't really run other live cds.. like slax..
I also think that if someone is looking for a "normal" hard drive install of a Debian OS, they should do what appears to be obvious common sense to me:
Install Debian.
As in the installation CDs from the Debian project.
If they want a preconfigured Debian installation with good hardware detection, they should do a KNOPPIX "Debian Style" hd installation. They can even help cut out some of the runtime bloat if they specify Fluxbox or IceWM as the default window manager. For fairly recent computers (Pentium III and up, or maybe faster Pentium II's) it is a nice bloat-free traditional hard drive install option (although the bloat files are still downloaded inside the ISO and are also sitting on your hard drive after installation even if you are not using them).
However, I can think of a different type of situation where the old DSL hard drive installation can benefit someone:
When the user is looking for a non-standard (IE: Not full Debian) hard drive installation for very old hardware with decent performance.
For some older computers (Pre-Pentium2 or even 486), there is a performance penalty associated with transparent decompression as is done via livecd and frugal. In this situation, they will get a boost from an EXT2 hard drive install.
But all the same rules still apply:
As a minimalist distro, compiling projects from source that have development lib and other dependencies will be a difficult task.
As a Debian-like distro instead of a "standard" Debian distro, apt-get will sometimes do "bad things", for example when GNU utilities are not installed in advance from MYDSL and also when trying to install packages related to the X-Windows system.
C'est La Vie.
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