New Release Candidate: 4.11rc2

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[frank4360]

Just upgraded from 4.10 on a 486 with 24 meg RAM i have had since 1988! 

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.

[Peppe76]

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)

[Vink8]

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!]

[Vink8]

.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!
--------

[ilakast]

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)..

[Nixie]

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

[nio]

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.

[jim2029]

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...

[jim2029]

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.

[Nixie]

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.

[TelegramSam]

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.

[q0815]

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

[Vaako]

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/

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!

[ilakast]

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

[TelegramSam]

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

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).