DSL Projects
Forum: User Feedback
Topic: DSL Projects
started by: MDG
Posted by MDG on June 01 2006,11:33
Sorry for the noobs question - just curious what DSL fans have made with DSL - I know I've heard of a firewall, a server and even a digital picture frame, but wondering about other things y'all are doing with it. DSL is AMAZING!!!
MDG
Posted by underdog5004 on June 01 2006,20:28
I use an old box to serve music to my 11-speaker stereo system. Works well, even though it's a 550Mhz
64Mb RAM
Box
That's what I do with my dsl. What kind of dsl are you?
Posted by kerry on June 02 2006,02:10
I'm still building mine, but i'm going for a quick and fast web surfer. I've tried running as my main OS but i keep ending up needing to much. I'm setting up the computer i'm using now for home working. I've installed the new Xubuntu with all i need to take care of basicly everything i have problems with in DSL. I'm building a dedicated DSL machine from scratch, i have almost everything, i'm going the extra mile and getting everything all new for my DSL machine, so far i have the monitor(a friend sold me his compac cheap,brand new never even opened the box, it came with his new rig but he had his own),keyboard and mouse(gyration suite,on sale), just picked up the router this morning so i can split my wireless connection to both computers. I'm taking my time selecting my motherboard because it's going to be on 24/7 and i want it to last and not fall short of my needs. I spent all day setting up this machine and with hard drives and fans the beast is hot and loud. It's funny when running DSL in ram on this rig with no hd's and all fan's(except cpu fan) unplugged the beast never even got warm to the touch and so quiet you couldn't tell it was on, now that i'm putting it back to a bloated system, i'm really missing my DSL setup, which just makes me want to finish it quick so i can turn this bloated beast off till it's needed.Pics of the beast(dual monitors)->
< http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/2682/screenshot0ec.png >
< http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/3175/screenshot19ia.png >
Posted by newOldUser on June 02 2006,15:55
There's a link to a similar subject from the home DSL website. I think it's called 'DSL at Work': http://damnsmalllinux.org/doingthings/I do enjoy reading about what people are doing with DSL and a little imagination.
Posted by desnotes on June 02 2006,16:27
kerry,I would be interested in knowing what you need that is not included in DSL. My project is to tweak and streamline the DSL-embedded version so that it is faster and can be used as a mobile desktop.
I know that DSL does not have all of the apps a typical 'full' desktop distro like SUSE or Ubuntu but I also view these same distros as bloated with too many unneeded apps.
Thanks,
desNotes
Posted by kerry on June 02 2006,18:22
Hey desnotes, DSL has everything i could need it's just making somethings work right because of the cut down nature that gives me problems in some areas. I can make most things work but sometimes it just takes alot of effort when i just want it to just work. I think i'm basiacly not being very tolerent this month, I busted my knee and am taking a crap full off meds so sometimes it gets hard for me to think straight when i'm trying to figure something out. 
at other times i just couldn't give a crap. 
I have a habit of trying to make my computer do what i want even if it can't. 
Posted by 300c_pilot on June 06 2006,08:41
I have turned a laptop into a network scanner for locating bottle necks, slow routers, bad nic's, printers, etc. It is very easy to use and boots fast on an old computer. If it would run a wireless card it would be better, but an access point hooked to the nic works fine. Lets you know where the problems are fast.
Posted by torp on June 06 2006,12:01
working on a media server surfer machine. looking to surf the web on my plasma while sitting in my lazyboy. got the box, got the os, now i just need to start adding components, DVD RW, wireless nic, wirless keyboard with intergrated pointer. bought a 160gb drive at compusa.com yesterday for $29.95 after rebate, so disk space won't be a problem....cause I got to 240 cd's to rip. that should be fun huh?torp
Posted by 300c_pilot on June 06 2006,16:03
Watchout for the compusa rebates, I sent in 120.00 worth and they sent me a letter saying I had exceeded the max. rebates for the year. I got $10.00 of the rebates.:( 
Posted by AwPhuch on June 06 2006,16:45
I hate mail in rebates...they bank on you not sending it in!! Freeking criminals!Brian
AwPhuch
Posted by torp on June 07 2006,12:10
is my first purchase at compusa, so hopefully i won't hit the cap. and i agree, i hate those rebates, but i just couldn't pass up this great deal!
Posted by AwPhuch on June 08 2006,00:25
I did restore an old beat up laptop that was absolutely worthless back to life..took me a few months to get the nic and sound settings going..but it did bring it back to lifeBrian
AwPhuch
Posted by tedmoore99 on June 13 2006,03:08
I have to add my 2 cents. At the school where I teach, several Compaq Armada 1750s were donated. I tried to put Windows ME on them for the school but no one liked them because they were so slow. I took one and have been trying different distros on it. I tried Knoppix, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, feather, and dsl. When I got to dsl my little Armada had some real spunk to it. I had some sound and wireless problems but, with the Forum's help, the problems have gone away. I even went so far as to try dsl-n but had some unexpected problems (system would reboot for no eason). So, for now, I will stay with the 7.4.26 kernel.
--Ted
Posted by Zucca on June 13 2006,06:28
I'm building portable server that includes:VNC server
ftpd
httpd with php support
sshd
I just need to do few scripts so that making user account could be faster.
Posted by dare2dreamer on June 14 2006,07:32
DSL is one of those "swiss army chainsaws" that I always keep in my geek kit. Because it is system light and handles older hardware well, it's my disc of choice to toss into mystery-meat pc's to determine what I'm dealing with.Beyond its use as a rescue and diagnostic tool, I've used DSL:
1. As a portable desktop on my usb thumbdrive, and as a cd. I've been 100% linux long enough that I actually get a little lost on other OS'es. Having copy that runs via QEMU/vmware/etc has been mighty handy when I was forced to go portable without my laptop.
2. I've now ressurected three laptops, all old enough to be considered relics. One of which is so reliable that it lives in the living room, with uptimes in the months. Coupled with a wifi card, it's my xterm of choice when I need to do something quickly, and it's often the pc that goes on "hazmat" duty when someone begs me to unscramble their network.
Someone needs to explain to me why older laptops have such wonderful keyboards. It really is why I can't let the "nine pound beast" go to the scrapheap.
3. My girlfriend's pc.
After a brief stint of laptop obsession, my girlfriend decided she wanted a pc on her desk again. Rather than blowing the budget on another loud, expensive machine for the office, I got the idea to set up a thin client.
Once again, DSL to the rescue. I found an old HP E-Vectra at a computer show for fourty bucks, frugally installed DSL and the NXclient extension and managed to materialize a decent monitor from the spares closet.
With a little tinkering, we now have a machine that securely logs into our main desktop machine, and as a bonus it does double duty as a guest machine when we kill off the nxclient.
Let's see, forensics, rescue, portable pc, three laptops, and a thinclient/guest machine. Not bad for fifty megabytes of penguin power.
Posted by 300c_pilot on June 14 2006,17:03
I like "Swiss Army Chainsaw" says it all doesn't it!
Posted by linux_gal on July 09 2006,01:26
I placed DSL on a standard CD with the base windows system. Everytime I crash Windows,
I used DSL to wipeout the windows directory
and the files in the root directory (backed up
of course) and just copy the CD copy of the
Windows to the drive. Takes about 3 minutes total.
Sure beats loading it up from scratch!
ah, but if I could just get the parr port
scanner to work with Linux...
Posted by crusadingknight on July 09 2006,01:59
| Quote (underdog5004 @ June 01 2006,16:28) |
| I use an old box to serve music to my 11-speaker stereo system. Works well, even though it's a 550Mhz 64Mb RAM Box |
I have an identical machine with a slightly faster celeron coppermine @ 566MHz, and 32MB of memory. DSL was the only distro that I could install on it (from which, I expanded it into a Frankenstein: on my system, the S has now come to stand for 'sloppy', because I forgot to use a package manager and installed everything from source. Ah well, I can fix that later, I plan to rebuild from my system using the pkg-utils from crux, to allow for package admin.)
Not even Arch Linux could boot for an installation in 32MB, so there's no way I'll be replacing the OS anytime soon. (Works like a charm with the glibc and gcc from Ubuntu 5.04 too. A little more bloated than the standard DSL perhaps, but still within reasonnable limits, aside from the time I compiled with 'g++ -O20'.)
Posted by brianw on July 11 2006,02:24
I have been wanting to do some Xterminal stuff so my kids could get more out of their old laptops. I have a Compaq Armada 7800 pII 266 96M ram. I installed kdm and set it up to allow connections then I installed DSL on my son's Panasonic CF-25 Toughbook PI 133 24M ram. Both are regular hd installs. Under normal conditions the CF-25 is so slow it is painful. It is as slow as a 486 so doing anything graphical is a nightmare. Anyway on the CF-25 I start the Xfbdev with the -ac option and I am presented with a login on my Armada and I am now using the cf-25 as an Xterminal. Things aren't super fast but the app server is only pII 266 and my network is only 10mbps and I share a connection with my wife over a dialup line using a 486 and freesco as a router.Using an Xterminal is not that super in and of itself but getting it going with such a small OS and on such limited hardware (and still be useful) is something. This CF-25 would not be surfing at all otherwise.
Posted by underdog5004 on July 11 2006,02:30
*points to previous post*[WHISPER]...whoa...[/WHISPER]
-Matthew
Posted by green on July 11 2006,03:41
| Quote (brianw @ July 10 2006,22:24) |
| .... I start the Xfbdev with the -ac option and I am presented with a login on my Armada and I am now using the cf-25 as an Xterminal..... |
I gotta know about this -ac option. Google didn't tell me much about it. Please explain?
Otherwise,
No special projects, or nothing unusual for me. i just want the basics.
Webserver
Music server
File server
FTP server
SSH server
Attached to DMZ running toram with 128mb ram, 200 screaming Mhz, nothin to hack really, if the bad guys get to it, everything on CD or in ram or both.
Booted from cheapo digital camera that uses a CF card, which still worked as a camera when not used as boot media.
Also booted from a cheapo mp3 player, that still performed as mp3 player.
DSL 1.5 is still the most robust DSL i've used to date. Can run for months without needing attention. Maybe it just likes my hardware?
Posted by brianw on July 12 2006,00:33
This is what the help says about it:-ac disable access control restrictions
basically it allows for XDMCP connections so the X server (Xvesa, Xfbdev, Xsvga. etc...) will look on the network for all XDMCP clients (i.e. XDM, GDM, KDM).
I haven't gotten it working perfectly yet. When I attempt to close the connection I keep getting the KDM login display on my Compaq from the cf-25. I need to investigate the Xserver file for KDM more to find out what I am doing wrong. When I do an alt-BACKSPACE on the cf-25 to shut down the Xserver it seems to leave the login hung on the compaq and I can't get back in until I change the Xserver file and restart KDM. Getting close though to having DSL setup as a main server (want to eventually have a fast server with DVD player and TV card so I can watch them on my 266 compaq).
Posted by brianw on July 12 2006,00:36
| Quote (green @ July 10 2006,23:41) |
| Booted from cheapo digital camera that uses a CF card, which still worked as a camera when not used as boot media. Also booted from a cheapo mp3 player, that still performed as mp3 player. |
Neat, I never thought about this but it is good to know (especially the camera hint).
Posted by newby on July 18 2006,03:22
| Quote (green @ July 10 2006,23:41) |
| Booted from cheapo digital camera that uses a CF card, which still worked as a camera when not used as boot media. Also booted from a cheapo mp3 player, that still performed as mp3 player. |
Huh?
What do you mean by "booted from an el cheapo digital camera" dito "mp3 player?"
DSL _runs_ on those? What would it do?
Hmmmmm... Some cameras have usb ports, one could connect a hub, add keyboard, et cetera.. Bizarre thought!
Posted by Caspar_s on July 22 2006,12:51
He uses the camera/mp3 player to boot a computer - a lot of them just show up as a removable drive. Getting it to still work like the camera and yet be a bootable drive is interesting though. (Oh and the usb ports won't talk like that unfortunately)
Posted by sfx00 on July 23 2006,00:24
im using DSL on my Laptop (even though it cant run at 16bits/px!)
Posted by evilbstrd666 on July 28 2006,00:55
I use it as a second option on my notebook. Picked up a batch of 210-MB mini-CDR's, used the mkmydsl script to set up my P3 1GHZ 256MB RAM Fujitsu Lifebook so it would boot faster than XP, and do everything I would need - Web, MP3, word processing, some games, etc. Ironically, it is faster to have DSL load to ram than to boot XP!Plus, I have a really boring meeting I have to attend on a weekly basis, so I want to try the toram option and see if I can get more runtime on the machine, without using the harddrive.... should be fun.