Damn Small Linux (DSL) Forums

Fixed apt-restore.  Updated default mirror to the ftp link as it has been more reliable.  Removed some unused files to tighten up the iso a bit.  For this rc I've added a syslinux version as requested.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/damnsmall/release_candidate/
4b61c7892eefc23b71d4931bdcc3f1f1  dsl-4.11.rc2.iso
da6b6ffea21ebb8c1533446390ce0c66  dsl-4.11.rc2-syslinux.iso

Downloading. Since it's 2:30 am here, feedback tomorrow......... :)

thank you so much for the syslinux version and of course the updated rc! I can't promise I will test it pretty soon, but as soon as I do, I will report back

YAY  ;D

Can't wait to get going... I <3 emulating stuff (just found the Blackberry Simulators, fun stuff :P )... I'll get VMware Player fired up soon :)

I just burned the latest and booted. A very nice desktop comes up, but the mouse doesn't work. It's a generic USB wired mouse. Is there a fix?

Often when there is a USB mouse issue it could be fixed by "enabling USB devices", or  setting "legacy USB support" in your bios.  Also, try to have the mouse be the only device plugged into the USB ports and see if that helps.

Thanks, John. I'll try to fiddle with the bios and see if that helps.

I tried your fixes: the mouse is the only device plugged in. My bios setup doesn't offer the choices you list, but both the USB Controller and the Front USB are shown as "on." The mouse is plugged into a USB plug in the rear of the GX520 Dell computer.
I know that not every Linux OS is compatible with every machine; maybe this is one of those mismatches.
Thanks again for responding.

Been busy but I have 2 frugal installs of 4.11 rc2 working fine here.Nothing bad to report.

I just grabbed 4.1.1-rc2.  I am currently using 4.1.0-embedded.  Is there a way to run 4.1.1-rc2 embedded, or do I need to wait for that version to be released after 4.1.1 testing is completed?  I will try running 4.1.1-rc2 in a virtual box for now.

There is a bug in this version, when using unetbootin.
After DSL boots it hangs when the message "scanning usb devices" appers.

This bug is not present 4.4.10, since unetbootin works great with this version.

Thanks Peppe76, I'll look into it.

Well, I tried to install on Virtual box and that went fine :)
I did, however ran into issues when tried out apt-get.
Are the repositorys out of date?

There are limitations to apt in DSL.  You may have better luck by downloading the .debs and installing them manually with dpkg.

dpkg -i --force-all  file.deb

Just upgraded from 4.10 on a 486 with 24 meg RAM i have had since 1988! 
Works great.  So glad you are back.  JR

And I thought I was too small with 180 meg RAM!

Works well for me also.

Congrats to the developers (though I will be posting a lot to get help with Dropbox, wireless, and no doubt other issues.

I think that I got some answers, after testing both the release candidate and the stable one.
I'm guessing that that the kernel has something to do with this, since I never seen this behavior in other linux flavors with 2.6 kernel + (but I have not tested the non-dsl flavor).
Ok, here goes - when using a usb mouse or keyboard, you must have (in my case. might be different for you) uhci usb disabled.
Now the differens is this way, some motherboards let's you choose is you want usb legacy enabled or disabled.
The differens is that on way you can have usb boot and keyboard, mouse support enabled, the other way you can only choose one.
As stated, I found a workaround - disabled uhci support, which worked (but it resulted in painfully slow usb stick)

Sound / Xmms
A newer version 1.2.11 is online at
http://www.xmms.org/download.php

Requirements:
 ALSA output: ALSA 0.9.0 or better.
 Esound output: esound 0.2.8 or better.
 Mikmod input: libmikmod 3.1.10
 Ogg Vorbis input: libvorbis
 OpenGL Visual plugin: Mesa 3.0 or better.

[I'm not so sure that "all" the requirements are so "necessary" to a "casual" user!]

.Jwmrc  home/dsl

Tools sub menu need "attention"
yellow folder have an unnecessary [-exec]
this seem better:

 <Program icon="files-yellow.xpm" label="Add to Bootlocal">

Years ago, I have had "fount" a simple idea (from "real world" office): for different task use different folder color, this will help in "no-waste time".

[example:...
<Menu icon="folder_cyan.xpm" label="Editor">
...
<Menu icon="folder_blue.xpm" label="Office">
...
<Menu icon="audio.xpm" label="Audio">
...
<Menu icon="folder_grape.xpm" label="Net">
...
<Menu icon="folder_green.xpm" label="Games">
]

For test, after "saved changes" go to "right click", Desktop, Menu, No Icons;
"right click", Desktop, Menu, With Icons, "et voilà"!

-----
Want a smiling days? Made Dsl better and share it!
--------

Installed and running on a 560X Thinkpad. I will report back as soon as my lan pcmcia card arrives, because I can't seem to connect with the wifi card and wpa encryption (only wep works, but my neighbours crack into it)..

I did a HDD install in a PC with two ISA cards, a Sound blaster 16 and a network card 3Com 3C509-TPO. The sound card is detected automatically and works but the network card does not. The network card was working in the Windows 98 it had previously.
Following advice I found in past messages for DSL I added modprobe 3c509 in /opt/bootlocal.sh. The module loads without errors and appears in "lsmod" but the network still does not work.

"pump -i eth0" results in "Operation failed". I see a similar command is already in /opt/eth0.sh called from bootlocal.sh so I omitted this command here, but during startup I can see the Operation failed that results when it is run.

Also tried to play with /etc/network/interfaces by adding eth0 and the result is the same, /etc/init.d/networking stop (command ok) and then /etc/init.d/networking start and there is a "Operation failed" between the messages.

Is there a problem with ISA cards and this version of DSL? Thanks!

* EDIT: Solved
Looking at the log I noticed IRQ 10 was also being asigned to USB. In BIOS settings I assigned IRQ 10 to ISA and that fixed the issue. I am editing the message from this PC!
The curious thing is Windows 98 worked fine that way.

I like it supports a serial mouse too. Great job.

One thing I should mention. I am using a SVGA monitor that supports MAX 800x600 or 1024x768 interlaced and the first time I loaded Live CD it set a resolution the monitor did not sinc to. It would be nice if it had tried to read the monitor specs from the VGA data channel before setting high resolution modes or at least ask for the resolution before.
The startup options provided in the LiveCD are somewhat confusing. One says to specify a code from a table of resolutions (7xx) but when you do it says the code is invalid and presents a list of text modes (80x25, 80x32 ...). Is that right?
I could enter X only after blindly exiting with ctrl-alt-del and running xsetup.sh

Hi, I am very happy that the development of DSL is alive again :-)

When I saw it on Distrowatch, I started to download the new release candidate. I managed to run the
dsl-4.11.rc2.iso
in VirtualBox of *ubuntu 12.04 with the same settings I use for other linux systems; it works out-of-the box for me.

Maybe a few days from now, I'll have time to test it in an old pc.

I'm glad to see this project is alive again... I missed it.

I just downloaded the 4.11rc2 and burned it to a cd. When I boot the cd I get a Kernel Panic... Anyone else getting this?

I'm using a P3 450MHz with 768RAM and a 32mb AGP video card.

Sorry about the screen shot size...

(http://goput.it/2av.jpg)

Ignore the above post... I've tried Kubuntu 7.04 I had laying around and same thing happens. As Well as Tiny Core also.... Something wrong with the CPU I think.

I installed this release in an Olivetti PCS P/75. This is a Pentium at 75 MHz, 16 Mb of RAM and 425 Mb of HD. It has a Winbond 10mbps PCI network card and Sound blaster 16 ISA card. The BIOS has no options to boot from CD so I used bootfloppy.bin to create a bootable floppy.

The first time tried to boot normally by pressing Enter and it booted fine until got stuck reading the CD forever with a blue screen.
Then tried F2 and entered "dsl 2", it booted fine to a command line where I could execute an HD install as described here:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/installing_to_the_hard_disk.html

All went fine, I assigned 25 Mb for swap and 400 Mb for ext2 partition.
The DSL desktop boots and works reasonably well given the computer specs. It takes two minutes to load up to an useable desktop. The mydsl app also works well, I installed Opera 8.52 and it was a quite fast install. Dillo viewer works pretty good, fast and little memory, for simple html may be fine but most pages look distorted.

Tried to run Firefox (the one that comes with DSL). Apparently it is a very heavy  memory eater. After 45 minutes of intense hard disk swapping, window title and border appeared. 15 minutes later tool and tab bars displayed. I kept trying to close the application and it finally closed.

Then tried Opera and it runs better than Firefox. Opens in reasonable time and seems to take memory depending on the complexity of the page being loaded. For instance simple pages load in reasonable time on this PC, more complex pages cause the PC to keep swapping to hard disk and run slow and even more complex pages cause Opera to close (I guess it runs out of memory).

Nice results.

John, I just thought I'd post and say good job.  I used DSL for quite awhile up until 2010 when I thought it was dead, and I'm going to try and get back on board (I'm laid off from my job, but I'll donate if I ever get called back...ah, this economy).  Anyway, I just wanted to say that the new RC is very usable and as to a browser I have a few suggestions.  I'm not that sure as to how much DSL has retained from Debian in terms of easily porting the Debian LXDE packages, but it seems to me that it wouldn't be that difficult to implement a lot of features native to LXDE; it's really been coming along, and I think it rivals XFCE at this point.  Midori is really advancing by leaps and bounds, and it' s a good middle ground between firefox and dillo.  Also, lxine player isn't ready yet, but down the road it may be worthwhile to add a video player of some kind based around LXDE if it becomes stable.

The current RC is a damned good OS, I'm using it on the first PC I ever bought, an Intel BX mobo with a 1.4 GHZ Tualatin (via slocket) and 768 kb SDR and it runs flawlessly.

Hi,

this new Version is great and works fine on my Asus EEE 701 as Live-Version.

Installing on internal drive via USB-Stick (unetbootin) doesn't work, since I get always the error "GRUB Hard Disk Error" on startup. Lilo-Boot doesn't work ether...

Any ideas? I'm quite a linux-n00b btw...

Thx

Hi,

I'm new to DSL and I wonder what file to download from the release candidate folder?

ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/release_candidate/ (ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/release_candidate/)

dsl-4.11.rc1.iso
dsl-4.11.rc2-syslinux.iso
dsl-4.11.rc2.iso

What is the difference between *.rc2.iso vs *.rc2-syslinux.iso ?

Thanks for helping out!

Enjoy http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/which_file_do_i_download_long_version.html  :)

That is actually a bug DSL has inherited by being based on an older version of Debian (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's Woody).  For whatever reason, older Debian iso's wouldn't install properly from a usb using dd.  I believe there was a windows program you could download that would make them boot successfully, but your best bet is to just burn a live cd and hook up an external usb CD drive (that's how I installed it on my original EeePC).

I am trying to install DSL 4.11rc2  into a Vmware VM, but am not able to get it to install to the hard disk. I have tried  having both IDE and SCSI virtual disks mapped and have tried installing to hda, hda0, sda, sda0.  DSL seems to format the disk with EXT3, install, ask for the bootloader, ask about windows, and even reboot. Everything seems fine but the DSL will not boot off the internal disk.

I need to make it boot off the drive (vmdk) and not the CD because I need to make 50 VMs as small as possible (no gui needed).

any ideas?

The idea of running a (more or less) updated Linux in an old machine and revive it is just AMAZING. I've been fighting with a Pentium III (512 MB RAM, 10 GB HD, 8 MB video card) with more than 10 distros and it is always slow... when it doesn't crash or give me a stupid problem (some tome no graphical login, root password doesn't work, no network, problems after updating some packages... etc.).
I have installed Wary, Puppy, (more than one version), MiniNo, ZenWalk, CrunchBang

Before that, I have tried many distros inside a VirtualBox machine in my PC, and since the processor is new, everything goes fine, even with 256 MB of RAM and 8 MB for video! But in the P III, things get really slow. The processor is the bottleneck, and perhaps the "not-so-much-compatible" video card.

Inside VBox the 3 versions of DSL (4.4; 4.11 rc1, 4.11 rc2) didn't let me use the mouse!!??  I'll try a live CD in that P III tp see what happens.

Did you really managed to run it in a 486, rittingj ?? WOW  :o

I'm planning on using it installed for good in the HD. Any suggestions, guys?
THANKS!

Bad news. In a Pentium III, still go the mouse problem (no mouse, no Alt+F2 response do write "xkill" or anything else).
The video started all messed up (greenish)and I have changed to VESA; the image got nicer, but no mouse, nothing :(
I guess one of the problems is the video card in that Dell PC from 1996 (a 3com or something). I'll check and post it latter.

The RAM usage is amazingly small (18 MB in a certain moment)! So I really really hope this version of DSL gets good and usable.

Which Pentium III processor/mobo combo is it?  I have an Intel 440BX running a Tualatin Pentium III via a Slocket, and everything is working flawlessly, so it is to be something very specific to your hardware.  Mine is using the original ATI Rage Pro video card, if that helps.

I recently tried out the DSL 0.4.11RC2 (as a liveCD, not any HD or USB install) on a VERY old (as in, it has reached the legal drinking age...) desktop and was shocked to see it actually load X :o, quite impressive considering the limits of this old box ;D! I have however found a few issues as well.

The box in question has the old-school 486DX50 processor, from the time before the clock-doubled variety became more common. RAM started out at 8MB but has since been maxed out at 32MB on the mobo; there is a slot for expansion to 64MB but that would require a proprietary and undocumented card only produced by the mobo company that folded more than 20 years ago and I have never been able to find it. The mobo is a combo VLB (Vesa Local Bus) and ISA rig, 3 slots of VLB and 4 of ISA. One VLB slot has the IDE controller (dual channels). The video card in an ISA slot is one of the infamous Diamond cards, don't remember the exact model number right this minute but it does do 1280x1024, I think at 24bit color, in Win3.1. There is no PS2 port available, so the keyboard has the old style largish AT connector, and the mouse (a 3 button type, I think it takes the Mouse Systems driver in W3.1) is on serial COM1. And of course no SDcard reader, no WiFi, no SATA ports, no USB ports of any flavor, no FireWire, no AGP, no network card, no internal modem, no PCMCIA, indeed not even PCI slots and it predates PlugNPlay. There is a Teac 6x IDE CDROM (one of the older ones that were read-only, not burners, and CD-only, not DVD).

Normally it has 2 IDE hard drives, the original 210MB (remember when that much space was considered very generous?) with DOS 6.22/Win3.1 installed, and later I added a 6.4GB drive (and when this was unimaginably humongous?) partitioned 3 ways - one partition is a backup mirror of the DOS/Win3.1 install, one left mostly empty for data storage, and the third set up for dual booting Linux Slackware 2.3. However for the task at hand these two drives are temporarily removed.

BIOS does not support booting from CDROM, there is no network card, and the installed hard drives are removed so I have to use a floppy bootdisk (didn't see one in the RC2 so had to borrow the image from older 0.4.4 - hoped this would not cause any issues, it seems to have worked).

Speaking of BIOS, that is the reason I picked this geriatric machine for the task at hand.... malware cleanup. I wanted a safe place to run dd and zerofill a 80GB hard drive (out of a 2005 vintage IDE based laptop) without risk of infecting the cleaning machine. I had started out using a Debian liveCD with the HD in the original infected laptop but soon found out this particular malware will implant itself into BIOS. Simply zeroing the drive is NOT enough >:(. Even if the BIOS is reflashed afterward, if the drive is still present the malware may return. These parts must be cleaned separately before putting them back together! And that is the attraction of this old hardware... it is so old it does not support BIOS flashing (this old beast has a ROM chip - changing BIOS requires REPLACING THE CHIP ::)) and does not have any network card/wireless option ROM so the malware can't go there!

The X desktop is some weird ugly colors that don't have very good contrast or visibility - like dark olive drab text on a deep navy blue menu that is VERY hard to read. It doesn't seem likely that anyone would have chosen these as standard colors; I'm assuming it doesn't quite understand the graphics card settings with the default boot parameters. So I thought I would try to adjust some of the settings.

After a brief amount of poking around the desktop to see what is there I was soon unable to select menu items with the mouse. The cursor still moved around the screen and items could be highlighted, and I got a "clicking" sound, but no action. After leaving the desktop environment I saw a bunch of messages about "respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes" and also "no more processes at this runlevel" or something like that :(. Could not do a proper shutdown at that point so ended up just powering off. Given the nature of my application, I could not allow it any swap space. I figured it had run out of available RAM so I tried to lighten the load.

Oh yeah, before I forget - while booting there was a point when it gave an error message something like "invalid mode" - after some tinkering I found the screen where it would list some video modes and want a number entered. The thing I eventually found workable was to enter "scan" instead of a mode number, this gave some choices that were not on the original list. I ended up using either "9" or "b".

After some research I found the cheatcodes I wanted:
   dsl 2 fromcd dma nopcmcia nousb noagp base noideraid noapm noapic nomce nosound nofirewire nodhcp nosmp
This allowed me to work awhile in textmode without the "no more processes at this runlevel" problem. After poking around to find proper device names for the HD I typed
   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=80M
and waited a long time. After more than 17 hours (but less than 20 hours) I saw that it had simply returned to the command prompt without printing any exit status ???, also no error messages.

Given the earlier problem of not enough RAM (?) for X, and especially the nature of my task, I was a bit paranoid about this unexpected behavior. Not the time (actually finishing turns out to take somewhat longer than that) but lack of the usual status output. I thought I remembered from poking around a bit with dd using count=1 instead as a test to be sure I had the right device name, it did seem to produce status lines (if the device names were right) that way but not for my big run - or is that just my goofy memory? I surfed around to find that the busybox sourcecode for dd should have printed some status lines on completion so something has indeed gone wrong. I suspect it may actually be a problem with the older 2.4 kernel, and dd calling kernel code that rolls over and dies at a 32GB boundary. This can be a MAJOR issue if anyone else is trying to use DSL for malware cleanup so I thought I should post here to make everyone aware of the limitation.

There was a liveCD of Debian Squeeze lying about that I tried but it would not boot... it gets to the point of "Loading kernel..." and then just hangs, it probably needs the full 64MB RAM they say is required even to boot text mode, but that I don't have. It does work in more modern rigs, just not my target box. (Also on newer systems it does print those status lines at the end of dd that have gone missing from DSL).

A couple more days of research on other liveCDs that might be suitable for my task turned up http://ttylinux.net/dloadPC-i486.html which I downloaded and burned to CD. I wasn't sure the DSL bootfloppy would be compatible so ended up using SmartBootManager (http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/download.html) for that purpose, it did nicely in case you ever drop the bootfloppies from your distro and need to recommend a substitute.

ttylinux ends up with the same device names as used in DSL, (for some reason Debian insists that the proper name is /dev/sda, not sure why it wants to be different on this) so I used the same dd command.

Waited a (very long!) while, and it finished after 50.33 hours and does indeed produce the expected status lines even on my old target box ;D. It also uses the busybox code so I think the difference is that ttylinux is using the 2.6.34.6 kernel (Debian Squeeze seems to be 2.6.32) rather than the older 2.4.31 in DSL.

If I assume write speeds were similar between DSL and ttylinux, then 20 hours would scale to about 32GB when it stopped, interesting since this was one of the older "stop points" in terms of disk drive sizes being supported in BIOS and other places. Definitely a small limit for drives today.

I guess this is all a rather longwinded way of saying I hope you consider upgrading to a 2.6 type kernel for your next release. Since the ttylinux download is only 13MB the kernel obviously CAN be made small with careful module selection that is still suitable for older hardware (granted you are including X where ttylinux does not, but still...). But if it REALLY won't fit your size limit for DSL, then at least for the DSL-N variant. Is saving that last 2MB really so critical considering the functionality tradeoff? Because not being able to zerofill even less than 80GB - which is a very small drive by modern standards - would seem like a major limitation for tasks like malware cleanup, or sanitizing private data, etc. Just thought y'all should know.

I thought I would try DSL.  I have a Toshiba Satellite 2140 CDS with an impressive 32MB.

I booted from the CD and all started looking good.  I got the following messages
Scaning for USB devices... Done.
 Accessing DSL image at /dev/scd0...
Total memory found: 29232 kB
Creating /ramdisk (dynamic size=21300k) on shared memory...Done.
Creating directories and symlinks on ramdisk... Done.
Starting init process.
INIT: version 2.78-knoppix booting
Setting hostname to box Done.
 Running Linux Kernel 2.4.31.
 Processor 0 is  AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor 451MHz, 64 KB Cache

At this point, it gives a very good impression of 'hanging'.  I think it's stuck.

Is there something I can do to get it further?

What boot codes are you using?

I have to type fb800x600 boot code at start up to get DSL to run on my laptop.
Experiment with various boot codes.

Hi, i am trying to start or intall dsl from usb stick. process both stops on " Cheking for USB "... try 4different sticks with the same result. netbook Fujitsu UH900

ASUS M5A99FX Pro R2.0. Can't find knopix file system. Memorex double layer DVD MRX-550L V5.

I had gotten the same cant find knoppix file system error, using the iso + syslinux usb option - < http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/install_to_usb_from_within_linux.html#Method_II:_Current_ISO_.2B_Syslinux > the first time i tried to get it running, but it didnt happen other times i tried it.

Wanted to make a suggestion of the creation of a bash script to make it easier to get the iso bootable on a usb. I have tried other bootable distros like Salix and Porteus that have such scripts in their isos, in addition to having a usb installation text file in the root of the iso.

Is there a way to update through the old version?

Hi,

I am trying the latest rc2 on a Toshiba Portege 3490.

I want to install Hylafax , however apt-get and dselect giving/showing me lots of conflicts.

Is it possible someway to install Hylafax in a stable way?

Thanks,
Burak

I think this project is well & truly dead - probably best to head over to tinycorelinux.net where the main developers from DSL went, or elase try puppy linux, or one of the other 'minimalist' distributions (basiclinuc, µlinux,....)

I love DSL.  DSL is the best distro because small is better. It is alive because my work is alive too. Everyday I enjoy my work with a computer with 128 mb of RAM and the repository  of DSL.  DSL always will stay with me!

Will there be another release?
(This release is getting very old now.)

What, if I may, does this have to do with DSL 4.11rc2? Looks more like an advertisement for clothing, thus being thoroughly off topic, and as such, is spam.

It's the curse of this forum striking again.

I just click the "Report to Moderator" button on a few of them and wait 'till John loggs in next. Last login was October, so it shouldn't be too long (if we're lucky, he checks once a month or so).

Hope this works with apt-get(Installer)
As the new mirror(http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/enabling_apt.html) on the page comes with a 404 error:
"
Mirror Down
As of Sun 7 Aug 2011, the ibiblio mirror is down, and attempting to install packages with the dpkg-restore script fails. Good news everyone! The mirror path is kept in a hidden opt file and can be changed with a text editor
       nano /opt/.dslrc
Change this entry on line 1
       Mirror: www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/
and replace it with the path to a working mirror like so:
       Mirror: www.ftp.be/packages/damnsmalllinux/
"
If you could fix this i would love it!
Kind regards, Paul.

1. Tell me, is it foreseeable in the foreseeable future updates to a fresh kernel, for example 2.4.37 or 2.6.39?

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AF%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE_Linux


2. Can DSL4 execute the instruction (instruction) TRIM when used with SSD
if not, would you like to add this feature?
(since hard drives are in good condition, there are fewer and fewer)