DSL success stories

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: DSL success stories
started by: Tranka

Posted by Tranka on Nov. 09 2003,02:39

On Thursday, tired of dealing with a bloated Red Hat 9 distro on my Winbook laptop (P233MHz w/128MB ram, 2GB hdd), I wiped the disk clean and installed DSL 0.4.10. Unlike the marathon install I had to endure with R9, DSL came into my machine's hard drive, took names and kicked derrier with flawless execution. Total time: ~15 min. (from CD boot to HDD boot).

I was so impressed with the lean meanness of DSL that the next day I decided to install it on my old AST 486 mobo w/32MB ram, 4x CDROM and 425MB hdd (this machine has the "uncanny" Pentium Overdrive upgrade running at a blazing 83MHz). With the aid of a bootable floppy, I was able to boot DSL and install it into the hdd with no complaints. The machine boots from hdd and deals with the Enhanced desktop very well. I am yet to do speed and performance tests, but so far it looks good. Time: ~30 min. (from floppy boot to HDD boot)

Thanks, John for a solid, no non-sense, let's get on with it distro. DSL has everything I will ever really need from a Linux distro while at home or on the road. If I ever feel the need to develop code or do desktop publishing, then I'll go to my office at work. 'Cause in the end, it's all about scope.

-Pepin

Posted by Randy Boehm on Nov. 09 2003,04:28

I too am happy with how easy it is to get DSL running properly on an older laptop. Currently am typing on a 100Mhz thinkpad with 40M ram. DSL was running within a few minutes, with the dvorak kbd layout and with both the ethernet card and the wireless card functioning.

Have tried Caldera, Peanut, Knoppix, Morphix, and Mulinux on this laptop, but the best I got with any of these was X with 600x400, and none too stable.

DSL runs slowly when compared to my other laptop, but that laptop has enough RAM to use toram. This one does not seem to browse any slower with DSL than W95.

Now, if I can figure out how to get the BJC-80 to print . . .

Posted by cbagger01 on Nov. 09 2003,18:10

You may need to install CUPS in order to get your BJC-80 to print graphics or formatted documents, but the driver info page says that the BJC-80 will print out plain text (US-ASCII type text) directly via the lpd printing system that is already installed in DamnSmallLinux.

For more details see:

< http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Canon-BJC-80 >

Posted by TiYogi on Nov. 15 2003,15:15

To Tranka,

I would be interested in how you got it install in you 486 machine.
I have a white box Petium 133 16Mb 2 gig machine which I am trying to install it on.
So far I can not get it to install.
The instruction are to boot and the go to XSHELLS
But nothing seem to happen if I click on this.
Does like take forever for it to load. I have waited 10 minutes and still nothing do I have to wait longer?
I have checked the cd out on another machine and it seems to be ok.

So could you explain what you did .