water cooler :: Interesting Article

I am sure that many of you are aware on the debate on popularity of the Distrowatch rankings. When Ubuntu was displaced as #1 there was much debate on just how accurate the rankings are and how they, the rankings, can be manipulated.

This article is about Ubuntu but in it you will find information on the popularity Damn Small Linux.

I was both surprised and amazed with the facts presented. It is not that I particularily care about this. I was drawn reading to the article because of the Ubuntu phenomenon and was totally surprised to see Damn Small Linux included in the analysis.

http://www.starryhope.com/linux....r-is-it

I know people, such as my brother who has never used a linux system, who know the word "ubuntu" but have no personal experience with anything open source, and he didn't hear of it from me.

The alexa ranking of DSL was a real surprise, though. I didn't expect anything close to that.

Wow. Well, at least it's good to see a lot of Windoze users want to check DSL out

I've often thought it was the effect of the phrase "50 megs of penguin power" that swayed people.

From a non-technical perspective, I guess you'd call it the "cute factor"

People like small things. Like diminutive food or short stories, there's little threat of being overwhelmed by something that advertises itself as bite-sized.

Like the joke says, "have a bite, it's wafer thin."

Also, according to the tin it comes in, DSL is a fifty megabyte download.

That means it is a short trip from "gimmie" to "got it".

In a time when it is not uncommon for a linux distribution to take up the space of multiple CD's (or even DVD's), people are going to be excited by the idea of a quick nibble. Even if their goal is to merely consider it an appetizer to the larger meal of trying a more sizable distribution.

Damn Small...Damn, it just made me hungry.

There have been several articles recently that cover the "hypervisor", which is typically a flash-based minimal operating system that can be booted very quickly simply to access a network, for example. Some major manufacturers have begun to include these systems in their machines to provide an alternative to waiting several minutes for Windows Vista to load.

DSL, or a stripped-down hardware-specific version, might be an interesting thing to supply as this alternative. I wonder what it would take to replace an existing hypervisor system with one of your own

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