User Feedback :: Dissapointed after 3 weeks of DSL

I tried DSL for about 3 weeks.
Because of claims made of it being able to run well on older hardware I even had hopes of starting some sort of computer recycling club for local school children whose families didn't have the means for a computer here in the appalachain mountains.

First I needed to set it up on something I bought secondhand for myself. An old p3 700 IBM thinkpad with 192 m ram that I bought really to use as a multimediadisplay at my booth at tradeshows. Slideshows, video and audio clips. DSL could do these things alright. But for my own use, and partly to consider the recycling idea above, I wanted to see just what could be done with dsl to turn this into a computer that could be used as a primary system. IE- surf the web, do e-mail, play a few games, open office, gimp, etc. Surely this would be easy as my system far exceeded the minimum requirements for dsl. I even bought the dsl book by mike weber to help me on my way.

I messed with the computer daily for 3 weeks. It could be roughly cut into 2 halves. The first half, I tried frugal install on the hard drive. This proved ultimately not to work. My RAM use never exceeded 80 mb according to conky (that's less than half my total) yet the system started locking up and freezing on me. 3 complete reinstalls later, I was still plagued by the same problem. I was extremely dissapointed because I felt frugal was an excellent concept and loved the idea.

So the next half, I played around with hard drive installs. These seemed to go better at first, until I rebooted and all mydsl extensions were gone! Well they weren't really gone, they were still right there in my root directory. But they weren't showing up on my desktop or menu. One thing I was looking forward to with hard drive install was that I would hopefully be able to edit some real files as root that I didn't have access to in frugal for some strange reason. For example, I was using the latest fluxbox found in mydsl. I wanted to turn antialiasing on and get rid of the windows-like eystrain. I was terribly dissapointed to find that not only could I not edit the necessary file in frugal, but once it was on my hard drive I could not get permission to edit it either. Poor choice, IMO.

So, after 3 weeks of repeated tries and frustrations, I called it quits for now. The past several days I've looked into other options-

vector linux- very pretty, screwy package manager that doesn't let you install everything listed in synaptic if you only have the basic, free version.

suse 10- LOL impossibly slow on this system

debian- choose my own packages. Very fast, but too dificult to set up drive mounting and so forth. Also, something screwy was going on with their configuration for fluxbox. Found the config files in about 3 places and when it changed my menu I couldn't locate the file to fix it because it wasn't found in the right place, (A file that looked correct was there, but that file wasn't displaying on the screen's menu). Ultimately very fast, but over my head.

xubuntu- that's what I have on here now. It's faster than vector, but not as fast as debian or dsl. But it's a lot easier to use, hardware works right, and things work the way they should with no surprises, and I have access to all my own files (imagine that concept!).

So, DSL- pros-

Is fast to install and reinstall
works on low end hardware
core system very functional and comes with good apps
disk drive detection and mounting work the way they should
I like fluxbox and it introduced me to fluxbox
I also like emelfm a lot and it introduced me to that as well

Cons-
Once I started adding extensions I started having problems very much right away after reboot.
Because of that I didn't find it realistic for the computer recycling club idea. Kids are going to need something easy to configure and install. Many will need something like open office, gimp, they will want gaim, a few simple games like wesnoth, clowns, and so forth. What I'm trying to say is that realistically, extensions are necessary and must work. They can't be a side concept that is sort of experimental, and my opinion based on 3 weeks experience is that is really where they are at.
Having only read access to some of the files is a big minus as well. Especially when they are configuration files.

While I'm at it the dsl book by mike weber was dissapointing as well. I saw some others on here very happy with the book, but to me it didn't cover what it should and covered some of what it should not apparantly simply to take up space. For examples, the book barely covers frugal installs. It doesn't cover making your own mydsl extensions at all. It mostly just covers very basic linux without a lot of mydsl specific content when it comes to system admin and management.

OK, so this might sound pretty negative, but I figure it's good for people to post what they are unhappy with so it might be improved.

I will still be trying dsl every few months- I've got the USB stick for frugal I can always use. I'm hoping it will improve enough that I will be able to use it for the recycled computer club concept. I was thinking I'd take a few kids in 5th grade here every year who obviously wouldn't have enough resources for their own computer at home, have them set up a dsl system with me from parts of donated machines, cover how to use it, and then keep them on a recycled computer at the club until 10th grade, at which time I figure they can use their own resources and knowlege eto get or build a computer. For my community that would mean a maximum of 20 or 30 kids in the club at any one time. I've called around to some of the pc shops and they have back rooms full of old 486 and pentium 1 machines and I'm sure I could set up collection sites at some of the small businesses. But I can't get the club going until I have an operating system like DSL, but it has to actually walk the walk, not just talk the talk. If I had gone into it trusting DSL's claims, I'd be in stormy seas right now. The concepts are great though, and I look forward to seeing it when it works right.

Best

I can't comment on the book. I have never seen it nor have I ever been consulted on it. As far as walk the walk, I daily 'eat my own dog food", which is a software term mean, I run what I write. We have many users sucessfully using Frugal and the myDSL system.
I know it is a different way of thinking but it does work. I run it this way on much older and smaller hardware than yours. As the developer of this, I develope for my own very old harware. Walk the walk. I do eveyday. Hope you find something more traditional.

I have not had any of the problems you had. Frugal works great for me on my 450 MHZ K6 IBM desktop, and another one that I put together with parts from two or three boxes of junk someone gave me, both with just 128MB RAM. I also use it on a 200MHZ laptop with 64 MB RAM and dual boot with Win98, and a mini-itx computer I built in a kid's lunchbox. I use the amsn extention with tcltk-8.4, alsa, Java runtime, Skype (on the laptop) Audacity (also on the laptop), imagemagic, gimp, and a few of the command line programs like elmo, aumix, and the wireless lan monitor. I have never experienced a crash of lockup on any of these machines.
I've learned to use EmelFM on the first try to access all of my own files, and any others for that matter. I can even copy to and from Windows partitions - imagine that.

Also, I wanted to add one more thing. I gave copies of DSL-1.5 out to several kids in their early teens a few months ago. They are still using it-and having a blast. They learned how it works much faster than I did, actually.

Roberts-
re: walk the walk
Didn't mean to insult you at all. I very much appreciate the time you took to try and help me get my ethernet running on this computer. I'm referring to my experience using dsl, not meant as a criticism of the developer. On my machine, it simply did not walk the walk. I was unable to use extensions successfully. In frugal, it locked randomly within a few minutes of being rebooted. Not on one install, not on two installs, but on at least 3 installs. On frugal I could get extensions to load on boot, but system would lock. This is not meant to be a review of dsl, but a review of *my experience* with dsl. The experience of a linux pro or especially you as a developer of DSL who knows it inside out is going to be different than the experience of an end user like myself. The human being who does not understand the mechanics but drives the car has to enter the experience as part of the equation. This could even be a problem with my hardware? My understanding of how to use extensions? Don't know. Tried to follow all instructions to the best of my ability and they did load up in frugal.

Hard drive install I did not get the extensions to even load on reboot. don't know why. After finding I only had read access as root to some files still, I just gave it up for now. For *me* 3 weeks was long enough to pull my hair out and I need a break for a while before trying again.

And I realize my frustration made the review negative. On the other hand, there are many positive things I like about DSL. I love the way the extensions are supposed to work. It was almost mac like to see them load up when booting. I feel it's nothing short of a revolutionary concept and love it. Unfortunately, frugal did not like my system as much as I liked it!

The book- I don't blame you at all. Hope you are getting some donation when the book is purchased as that was my understanding. And it is kind of a cool book in some ways, but didn't go deep into dsl IMOl, and that is what I wanted.

doobit- that's very good and I wish it was my experience as well, but it was not. Maybe I'll have to try it on other hardware and see how much of this was just my thinkpad and how much was dsl itself. If my experience is rare, it could still work for what I want to do with the computer club.
As an old hack with Amiga Computers, I love Emelfm- it's almost an exact clone of popular amiga file managers. I had never seen it before and it isn't going to leave my linux systems. That and fluxbox were worth the frustration. My linux experience prior to this has been limited to gnome and kde. I liked fluxbox (and now using xfce) much better- again a lot more like the good old amiga where you have more choices and aren't just forced into a complete one size fits all desktop. Seeing all this stuff was worth the headache.

I suspect some of the problem was hardware. Linux is often easier on hardware than Windows, in my experience. I had a power supply going bad on my "fast" computer and it was evident with many crashes and lockups in Windows. I usually had to boot it into Ubuntu Linux and let it run for a while before I could reboot into Windows and have it stay up. I finally repalced the power supply, but having Linux on the hard drive gave it a few months of extra life.

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