mydsl: DSL can be whatever you wish!

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: mydsl: DSL can be whatever you wish!
started by: gjhicks

Posted by gjhicks on May 26 2004,00:53

Hello,

I am another user very happy to be able to extend DSL with the 'mydsl' facility.

I notice that many other users are making up 'mydsl' packages for various programs and utilities - thanks from a learning linux user!

My aim (I imagine with many others) is to get away from MS bloatware. I have tried Mandrake, Red Hat, Knoppix (and Gnoppix) but found them all to be way too clunky - with amazingly silly icons, layout and repetitive menus. DSL is 50mb and Knoppix is 700mb - but the functionality/useability of DSL is much more than the apparent size difference would imply.

I really like the fluxbox GUI, much better than all that 'nanny' stuff in the major distros.

I know that DSL is designed to fit on a business card CD and that its development is toward that aim but the arrival of the new 'mydsl' functionality allows DSL to be the base of a more full featured system. With the huge advantage that the user gets to select what features to include.

But (always a but!) there is a problem.

I have a usb wireless device that is not supported by the standard drivers. I have the correct driver and it works fine under the 'big' distros. I also have some utilities that are designed for my laptop, again they work fine under the 'big' distros.

Even after installing dpkg-restore, grim's tar, make and gcc, the installation of these packages falls over.

It seems to me (remember I am pretty new to this) that there are some holes in the guts of DSL - I presume that these 'holes' are due to the size restriction of DSL.

For example, when installing my usb wireless device routine, I got a series of errors during the 'make install'. I piped the 'make' output to a file and found that the instruction included:

-I/lib/modules/2.4.22-xfs/build/include

When I looked at the files on the disk, I found that 'build' was a symbolic link in the /lib/modules/2.4.22-xfs/ directory, to /usr/src/linux-2.4.22, which doesn't exist.

So, is it possible that one of the people busily making up 'mydsl' packages could make up a 'mydsl' package that included the kernel image and (here I have no idea of what is required!) the other files, etc. required to set up DSL for using make and install?

Thanks,

Geoff.