Apt-get :: Best way to upgrade DSL



The following essay re. the development of DSL and the "frugal"install is quite enlightening.

"A Developer's Perspective of Damnsmall Linux (DSL)"

http://www.shingledecker.org/dsl.html
Nym1,
Thanks for the link. It is very helpful, but the writer's desire to be on the "cutting edge" is not a concern of mine. I will be teaching near senior-citizen types who have come from heavy manufacturing and for whom computer experience is almost "none." Not all of these machines have CDrom drives, so i would have to use a floppy to boot on most of them. Some no USB, so can't save the OS to a pen drive. It may be that because of the different configuration of the machines, will mean a different configuration of DSL.

I was assuming, and maybe incorrectly, that there would be less admin hassle with an HD install. Again, experience will probably give me an answer and I'll post my comparison here. I've been using computers since the CPM days, so this type of comparison won't be very hard.
My experience is that if the myDSL apps fill your needs and you want a very secure easy to recover system then the frugal install seems to be the way to go.  For me I use a traditional HD install because I am constantly adding things using synaptic and compiling in things and I find it best to have the HD install.  Also I only have 96 M ram and want my cdrom for other things, sometimes I boot up with my floppy inserted so I don't have the cdrom even in my laptop.  I also like multi user logins, kids and wife use my laptop periodically so they have their own logins so I use KDM for graphical login.
Quote (adamsjw2 @ Mar. 15 2006,21:38)
. It seems most of the folks there choose frugal, but I'm not sure why from reading the posts. I may frugal one machine and keep this machine I've hd installed on today and see if I can make up my own mind. These machines aren't ancient, PII 333 with 128-256 meg ram. ...
Thanks,
Jim >A

Frugal installs apps during boot. The OS is always loaded 'fresh'
so any upgraded app installs cleanly.
I've run DSL quite comfortably on old office machines PII 128mb or 256mb rams (^&%* misey old company won't upgrade thier machines). A-hem anyway, it would depend on
how big are the apps you run.

If they are mostly deb packages, wouldn't you be stuck with deb anyway?

original here.