DSL revival?

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[lm]

I've been doing a lot of research into lightweight, low resource applications.  Gtk 1.2 applications may no longer be in development.  However, there are a lot of useful SDL, ncurses/pdcurses and FLTK based applications that are actively developed and are lightweight and would run well on older systems.

JWM is great as a lightweight X window manager, but if you want something that might be lighter on low resource machines, framebuffer applications could be an option.  The Nanolinux distribution and Rogue Class Linux distribution both run completely in framebuffer.  Another option besides X might be Wayland. 

There are two webkit browsers that are FLTK based, netrider and fifth.  Webkit based browsers can handle most modern web pages, but they can take up a lot of resources.  The FLTK based webkit browsers are probably the lightest in that class.  There are lighter options, but most can't fully render a modern web page.  One interesting lighter option is Dplus which is a fork of Dillo.

If anyone's interested in further development of DSL, I'd be willing to volunteer to help out with applications.  I'm working on build scripts and patches for several lightweight applications to make sure they continue to build and run smoothly as various libraries are updated.

[CNK]

Nice suggestions, I've long held a wish to update the libraries in DSL to support specific software. Perhaps released initially as a combined My-DSL package (or something similar) of base libraries, and added to as more applications are updated. Eventually the libraries and updated applications could be integrated into an independent release as a DSL spin-off (DSL-Update was my idea for a name).

This is an idea designed to accomodate my lack of time to really work on compiling the software (and the fact that I'm not very good at it - I usually spend an afternoon dependency chasing just to discover in the end that a dependency's dependency needs a 2.6 kernel (a fact often buried in a changelog somewhere) and there's no earlier version that's compatible). As it is, even with this incremental approach I haven't managed to get anywhere yet - even my last attempt to compile a DSL extension failed when the software's configure script revealed that it needed the C++ Boost extensions, but didn't say which part (I ran out of time trying to work it out - compiling all of it crashed the system).

The key thing from personal experience, and posts at this forum, is the internet. Internet related applications such as web browsers and document (mainly PDF) viewers have to be upgraded for the distro to be truely usable in the modern era. Thank's for noting Netrider and Fifth, I wasn't aware of either and they offer an attractive alternative to Firefox (though in theory I believe modern versions of Firefox may be able to run in a DSL system with the required updated libraries (including GTK), Chromium won't run on Linux 2.4). Development stopped quite early on Dplus so I'm not sure whether there's much improvement over Dillo.

[MPS]

is there a mirror with a list of software and a system update?

[CNK]

Just the official mirrors (http://damnsmalllinux.org/download.html).

Unfortunately I for one am not likely to find the time to work on my DSL-Update idea any time soon.