Damn Small 0.6.2

Forum: Site News
Topic: Damn Small 0.6.2
started by: John

Posted by John on Mar. 23 2004,08:10

http://damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-0.6.2.jpg
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/notes.html >
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/download.html >

Posted by bluefreak on Mar. 23 2004,09:26

yay! new release! btw, what is busybox? looks very useful

Posted by roberts on Mar. 23 2004,20:21

Damn Small Linux was a pioneer using the tiny X servers on a Desktop Knoppix based systems and many other distros have built their small distros based on John's work. John has a list of them, I was amazed when I saw the list. Most all have exceeded the business card size of 50MB or do not offer a desktop. Many embedded linux based appliances have used busybox, a "swiss-army-knife" of sorts. It replaces many of the GNU utilites that have been developed by the Freee Software Foundation. These collection of utilites are not Linux. Anyway, many of these individual utilites were replaced starting with 0.6.0 with a single utility, called busybox. When you do an ls command it is really calling busybox. If you do an ls -la /bin/ you will see many utiltites calling busybox So once again Damn Small Linux is a pioneer in achieving the smallest fully featured desktop in under 50MB. Busybox is transparent to the all the applications on the liveCD. But for those who wish to use DSL as an normal distro (non-liveCD) and install to their hard drive, they now have a choice, starting with 0.6.2, to not use busybox. Those users who typically add lots of applications may need some of the enhanced options that have been added to the GNU utilities. Now DSL offers both the smallest fully featured liveCD desktop and a GNU compliant installed system. DSL users can have the best of both!

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 24 2004,01:47

Kudos on the new version of DSL. The GNU utility restore function of the DSL hd install is a nice improvement that won't be noticed by many, except that some future busybox-related problems will be avoided before they happen.

Downloading it now...

Posted by DrWatt on Mar. 24 2004,02:19

Would like to hear a bit more about the non-busybox version in 0.6.2. I typically add stuff that exceeds 50MB when I do my HD install of DamnSmall, but I like to run on small machines with 128 Megs or less.

Posted by Rapidweather on Mar. 24 2004,03:53

Uh Oh, I downloaded 0.6.2, and did knoppix restore=/dev/hdb2 (where I have my
0.6.1 tarball, with Mozilla Firebird), and my desktop came right up! Didn't have to
restart fluxbox. All that worked a little _too_ good, as I have my old 0.6.1 menu, and not the new one. Also, since I save my .xinitrc, my own message appears and not the one that goes with 0.6.2.
---
Oh well, I gotta fix that. Want to see what the new menu has!
---

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 25 2004,05:36

Downloaded DSL 0.6.2...

So far, so good. However, I did have a few observations.

The Fluxbox keyboard shortcuts are still broken. See this post for details:

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....fluxbox >

My advice is to replace the dead simlink at /etc/X11/fluxbox/keys with the key file located in /home/damnsmall/.fluxbox/keys
I would also replace the dead simlink at /etc/X11/fluxbox/init with the equivalent file in the /home/damnsmall/.fluxbox directory

Why?

Because having a default global keyboard shortcut map will work with the add user skeleton functionality, while there is no easy way to replace "/home/damnsmall/.fluxbox" text inside the init file with a new "/home/newuser/.fluxbox" text

Also, the Busybox "tar" function is still broken and is causing errors for people who download apt-get packages to RAM when running from LiveCD. The error message is "tar: Couldnt remove old file: Is a directory" and it is a documented bug with Busybox.

Until this problem is fixed by the developers, my advice is to replace the "tar" symlink to busybox with the real GNU tar program.

See these threads for details:

< http://www.busybox.net/lists/busybox/2003-November/009989.html >

< http://codepoet.org/lists/busybox/2004-February/010813.html >

Thanks again for all the good work.

Posted by Bryce on Mar. 25 2004,08:53

Great work!

I was able to remaster the new version, adding Mozilla, but as of yet been unable to get Java applets to work.

Posted by Rapidweather on Mar. 25 2004,13:50

Bryce,
Could you post a mini-howto on your remastering method? Or, perhaps a link to
a web page of yours where that can be found.

Posted by charpie on Mar. 25 2004,20:08

Bryce, I am interested as well to see how you did it since all my attempt to remaster have failed so far.

Posted by Bryce on Mar. 26 2004,05:25

Check the "HowTo" forum. I posted instructions there. It is quite easy, just remember to unmount everything before mastering!!

Posted by thesumis41666 on July 29 2004,20:44

0.6.2 has a bug in the PPP config boxes

just letting you know

Posted by thesumis41666 on July 29 2004,20:49

im not sure if it continues over into newer versions though

Posted by Rapidweather on Aug. 02 2004,23:11

I used 0.6.2 as a base when I remastered DSL, and one thing I had to add was
wvdial, as I could not get the stock DSL dialer to detect my modems. All this was in the days before the mydsl extensions, when one wanted something in DSL, one
remastered it into a custom DSL.
---
Another topic:
I have one computer with a "bus mouse" that works, sort of, in DSL 6.2. I cannot
drag the windows around on the desktop at all, and the menu cannot be repositioned or taken apart. One has to use it as it is, no moving it around, etc.
Also, cannot select text to copy and paste in Scite (and other gui applications)
Other than that, the mouse works OK.
Somewhere in DSL if one tries to write a new mouse configuration with "mouseconfig", it is ignored, or rather overwritten immediately when returning to X.
---
Does anyone have any ideas, and also, is the latest 0.7.3 DSL able to
use a greater variety of Mice? I saw a post about the "boot: dsl xsetup" or
something like that. Will that work on 0.6.2, where I have remastered an
.xserverrc in it that boots me directly to 800x600.
I suppose I would have to remove that, and go through the steps to set up
a screen size, resolution, mouse, which is a pain each time, and also makes it
hard to sell the DSL system to Windows users.