I needed a USB pendrive distro that I could use for administration and disaster recovery. I had heard good things about Damn Small, so I decided to try it.
Installing it to the pen drive was easy -- I followed the directions in the excellent wiki page.
I was delighted at how fast it booted and I liked the minimalist environment.
Then I tried to connect to the network, and found that neither the Broadcomm wired adapter or the IPW2200 adapter could be used (they weren't detected; they are detected in both Knoppix and Ubuntu).
So I said, "I don't need the Internet now, I'm just transferring some files". Then I found that jfs didn't work, and my system is JFS.
I'm a lot less impressed now than I was when I started.Too bad, the current stable DSL doesn't include ipw2*00 and JFS is too new to be in linux 2.4.26..
You could compile your own kernel...
Quote
I'm a lot less impressed now than I was when I started.
It wouldn't be so "minimalist" if it included every conceivable driver to support newer hardware and every file system. The compromises that would have to be made to *include* everything in 50MB would leave a lot of legacy computer users more frustrated than you seem to be. And DSL has continued to support legacy systems while the Ubuntus and Knoppixes haven't. DSL can be extended so it's modular and remains usable on older hardware and newer hardware alike. That impresses some of us a lot more than Ubuntu and its bloated demands ever will.
That said, maybe you should search the forums to see what others have done to get ipw2* working in DSL.
original here.