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As it happens, M-Disc DVDs actually are the archival discs I have in mind.

(The company put out a press release last month that in the second quarter of this year, they'll be releasing Blu-Ray M-Discs, which they claim will even be writable on regular drives. Given the seven-fold increase in capacity, I'll likely be waiting for that product to store the main archives on.)

Ha, so I'm preaching to the converted then. Interesting that they are going for Blu-Ray disks compatible with standard recorders, I thought that Blu-Ray laser power was getting pretty darn strong, but I didn't realise it had reached this point yet. I heard that earlier drives have lower powered lasers than the later ones though, so it will be interesting to see how that works out.

I'm quite happy to learn how to compile - for one, I'm rather fond of the screensaver I've been using for years ( http://www.fourmilab.ch/skyscrsv/ ), and if I can work out both how to compile it (from the source at http://www.fourmilab.ch/skyscrsv/download/3.1b/skyscrsc.zip ) and get it arranged so it can be a Linux screensaver instead of just a standalone executable, I'll be even happier. I figure if-and-when I can figure out, or find, how to manage that, I'll be much closer to working out how to recompile Kiwix for DSL.

OK, I'm afraid you're a bit confused over the nature of compiling Linux software from source. That screensaver is made for Windows, and the source code simply contains the code used to program it for Windows so that curious Visual C programmers can satisfy themselves. However packages like the linux source for Kiwix are (a) designed to run on Linux and (b) include documentation, a configuration script and a roughly standardised layout that means that any old PC user who never programed a computer to say "Hello, World" can still get the software installed.

Basically, the lesson to learn is that "source code" does not mean "Linux". That screensaver in particular would rely on many features particular to Windows in order to function, in fact I expect a complete re-write would be required for it to work in Linux. Often Linux compatible source code is in a gzip compressed tarball, ie. with a ".tar.gz" extension. In rare cases (generally for old and obscure software), it might be Zip compressed, but usually the ".tar.gz" extension is a good rule of thumb. Err, except for the ".tar.gz" extensions in the MyDSL repository, they are pre-compiled but compressed in the same way.

Still, I agree with starting small. It's much more rewarding to get a small program with few or no dependencies to run than to begin with a complex dependency chain. Looks like you'll have to find a new Planetarium screensaver for Linux though.

However I think the best bet is with Millenniata's "M-Discs" (http://www.milenniata.com/). As much as the advertising screams to me those old "last until we're out of business" guarantees, the principals seem very sound. With the high powered laser diodes of today (trust me, they are), there's no real need for special organic dyes when a good laser can burn into the solid surface of the disc. You will need to buy a compatible DVD drive though, and their rather expensive discs.

As it happens, M-Disc DVDs actually are the archival discs I have in mind.

(The company put out a press release last month that in the second quarter of this year, they'll be releasing Blu-Ray M-Discs, which they claim will even be writable on regular drives. Given the seven-fold increase in capacity, I'll likely be waiting for that product to store the main archives on.)

Anyway, onto topic, it looks like Kiwix was only released last year, so the chances of finding it in the repository are pretty much zero (especially seeing as I did a search). You can forget about using the Debian package at that link, DSL was compatible with Debian 3.0 "Woody" which is now long obsolete. The Debian "Sid" package you linked to is for a version very different from DSL and just won't work.

As a result you will have to compile the software yourself, if it is at all compatible. Indeed with such new software, it could well be incompatible with the 2.4 kernel version used in DSL. Still, well worth a try if you're up to it. There are some packages in the DSL repository for setting up a compiling environment in DSL. Basically you'll need "gnu-utils", "gcc1-with-libs", "compile-3.3.5" and "gcc-2.95". Though "compile-3.3.5" is getting a bit old now so you may end up having to compile some new programs to use instead of the old versions it includes. Then you need to download the source of Kiwix, look at the "README" and "INSTALL" files from the tar.gz archive and work out the dependencies it needs (many won't be in DSL by default, or will be too old). You now need to find and download these and try to install them (look at the instructions in the INSTALL file, or just do the normal "./configure --help | less", choose arguments to append, if any, "./configure <args>", "make", "make install"). While doing these, you will find the "configure" script will probably want yet more dependencies before it can install some dependencies. Yes dependencies need dependencies (especially in DSL), this can go on for a while. Then you may well at some point find a dependency that just doesn't like kernel 2.4, at which point you can either find a way around it, move to DSL-N with the 2.6 kernel, or give up.

Well that's got to have put you off. I'm not saying that it's bound to be that much work, but I know it can be (anyone else tried to compile "glom" database software for DSL?). Go on, give it a go, look what you'll get out of it.

As a compromise to get myself more used to Linux, I've put Puppy Linux on a USB drive and have started using it as my main OS. It's not quite as small as DSL, but comes a touch closer to what I'm familiar with, while still giving me a bash shell, and all that other Unixy goodness. I'm quite happy to learn how to compile - for one, I'm rather fond of the screensaver I've been using for years ( http://www.fourmilab.ch/skyscrsv/ ), and if I can work out both how to compile it (from the source at http://www.fourmilab.ch/skyscrsv/download/3.1b/skyscrsc.zip ) and get it arranged so it can be a Linux screensaver instead of just a standalone executable, I'll be even happier. I figure if-and-when I can figure out, or find, how to manage that, I'll be much closer to working out how to recompile Kiwix for DSL.

How can I help? I mostly hung out on the forums when I was learning back in '04ish, but I think I'm too grumpy for that now. I've got both RCs on Virtual Machine, tried my hand with the deb2dsl script last night, and I've still got some older/lower end machines to test on.  I need to find an appropriate way to give something back to this community.

First of all, I'd think twice about using even archival disk media. It usually uses a metallic layer that can't corrode as in normal discs, however I don't believe it does much to prevent the deterioration of the organic layer which the laser burns to store the data. There's lots of controversy about this though. By the way, disc technology really hasn't changed since the CD days (hence the following links), the lasers have just got better.

http://www.myce.com/news/cd-recordable-discs-unreadable-in-less-than-two-years-6450/
http://www.cd-info.com/archiving/longevity-report/index.html
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_quality.shtml

I suppose the discs you got say they are guaranteed for 100/200 years. When I read that though, I just think of the VHS tapes I have with "Lifetime Guarantee" written on their jackets. Can you imagine trying to get compensation after you lost a precious home movie on VHS tape that was recorded twenty plus years ago? Heck the company might not even exist.

Of course, then you have to wonder what media is suitable. Mechanical HDDs are probably in the same category as Floppy disks in term on non-suitability due to their mechanical complexity. I don't know the facts, but it seems like far too long relying on the charge storage of Flash Media. Tape drives? Well the majority of VHS tapes lasted all right (though some of those guarantees probably deserve to be claimed) and they often use similar technology, but I wouldn't recommend it. I read an article about Bell Labs using some "holographic" technique to use lasers for burning data into crystals, fun for a read anyway.

However I think the best bet is with Millenniata's "M-Discs" (http://www.milenniata.com/). As much as the advertising screams to me those old "last until we're out of business" guarantees, the principals seem very sound. With the high powered laser diodes of today (trust me, they are), there's no real need for special organic dyes when a good laser can burn into the solid surface of the disc. You will need to buy a compatible DVD drive though, and their rather expensive discs.


Anyway, onto topic, it looks like Kiwix was only released last year, so the chances of finding it in the repository are pretty much zero (especially seeing as I did a search). You can forget about using the Debian package at that link, DSL was compatible with Debian 3.0 "Woody" which is now long obsolete. The Debian "Sid" package you linked to is for a version very different from DSL and just won't work.

As a result you will have to compile the software yourself, if it is at all compatible. Indeed with such new software, it could well be incompatible with the 2.4 kernel version used in DSL. Still, well worth a try if you're up to it. There are some packages in the DSL repository for setting up a compiling environment in DSL. Basically you'll need "gnu-utils", "gcc1-with-libs", "compile-3.3.5" and "gcc-2.95". Though "compile-3.3.5" is getting a bit old now so you may end up having to compile some new programs to use instead of the old versions it includes. Then you need to download the source of Kiwix, look at the "README" and "INSTALL" files from the tar.gz archive and work out the dependencies it needs (many won't be in DSL by default, or will be too old). You now need to find and download these and try to install them (look at the instructions in the INSTALL file, or just do the normal "./configure --help | less", choose arguments to append, if any, "./configure <args>", "make", "make install"). While doing these, you will find the "configure" script will probably want yet more dependencies before it can install some dependencies. Yes dependencies need dependencies (especially in DSL), this can go on for a while. Then you may well at some point find a dependency that just doesn't like kernel 2.4, at which point you can either find a way around it, move to DSL-N with the 2.6 kernel, or give up.

Well that's got to have put you off. I'm not saying that it's bound to be that much work, but I know it can be (anyone else tried to compile "glom" database software for DSL?). Go on, give it a go, look what you'll get out of it.

Have a friend with an XP Pro locked out because can't remember a login pwd for the only acct available (Administrator). Have read a lot lately about this & would like to try "chntpw" from the Ubuntu repository (or semewhere else) or something else that I already unkowingly have.

Since I haven't used much DSL it occurred to me that it might come with something for that purpose already or, there's something downloadable that accomplish this end. Does it exists?

Thanks for any insights/ideas around this!

I knew absolutely nothing about Linux when i first found the DSL community and I want to encourage you to keep reading and learning. The community here is very supportive and I quickly became far more comfortable with DSL than I was with the "normal" newbie distros of the day, such as Mandrake, Mepis, Kubuntu, etc. simply because I felt respected and was not afraid to ask questions and talk about my oopsies.

That said, I am currently running DSL on Virtual Machine within my Ubuntu box. I would love to get rid of Ubuntu for philosophical reasons: I want to move away from proprietary software altogether and even though my older son bought me a System76 Wildebeest for Christmas '11, not everybody is lucky enough to be able to afford that kind of hardware and I'd really rather spend my time here than feeling sorry for myself that the Beest isn't going to be new and shiny and fast forever. I have to accept the fact that ditching Ubuntu isn't going to happen right away, though, because I have a five year old younger son and other things going on in my life. At least I'm not stuck on the consumer treadmill trying to save up money for a Windows 8 machine, anyway, so i consider myself fortunate.

If you don't have a dedicated DSL machine, you can still learn quite a bit from running off the CD or a virtual machine. You didn't mention the specs of your Ubuntu box, but if you have enough RAM, Oracle Virtualbox is right in the reps and it's ridiculously easy to install and use. I'm kicking myself for thinking I wasn't smart enough to understand it for so long.

RAM is cheap and DSL isn't very resource intensive, so you might find yourself using your guest (virtual machine) more than your host (Ubuntu install) over the course of time as things start making more and more sense to you.

Enjoy the journey rather than racing to the destination. You're in the right place to begin an adventure that could change your entire way of looking at computers and human nature.

As the person who first told me about DSL would say, "Welcome to the revolution".

Blecch, I wanted my first post to be a re-introduction but I guess I'm still me if anyone even remembers me any more.

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 , quite impressive considering the limits of this old box ! 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 . 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.

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.

Sent you an e-mail.  Let me know if you have any issues getting it.

Well, just did the following and works:


Added the following line at the end of file:

/etc/init.d/dsl-config

sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward"


My previous example is no more needed with this new step.