zipslack;dsl;beatrlx;tiny;90 more;ssl connects

Forum: HD Install
Topic: zipslack;dsl;beatrlx;tiny;90 more;ssl connects
started by: mcurtiss

Posted by mcurtiss on Sep. 02 2005,20:26

Wonderng if anyone has bothered comparing DSL to the 90 other minimalist distros, including tiny, beatrlx (very interesting), zipslack, etc, etc.? I have been searching last few days and have not found any page that compares all of these minimalist distros.

Re my earlier comments, toposted here, due to still problems with this site keeping it's login information,even with cookies enabled, concerning the browser alerts from paypal I was getting, it awaits further testing as yesterday with the help of a new online scanner, I found one of the public machines I was using had spyware on it, so that could be the source of that problem; I will report back if it is and I apologize in advance for that. Also the page down on this post page does not adjust for the size of the text from entry box so page down results in several pages of empty space.

Even with the best AV programs, it is still difficult to catch ALL of these damn spyware and other malware junk and doubly so on a public box. I am using Kaspersky on my home machine, but I don't even trust that to catch everything; the spyware detection programs I've heard about do not seem adqequate to the job (suggestions welcome).

As of now I am considering zipslack, tiny, beatrlx and perhaps a few others, although DSL is also on the list and appears to have wide-spread popularity.

I am looking for something that will give me most internet capabilities, including wireless and modem (btw, how does DSL handle win modems, few distros work with them and they are on alot of laptops), is stable and where I don't have to hunt all over and compile,etc for the hardware to work. Again suggestions are appreciated.

MC

Posted by mikshaw on Sep. 02 2005,20:43

I can't respond to most of it, since I know diddly about security.

Winmodems were truly a mistake from the start. Fortunately the one i have is Lucent, which is one of the more commonly supported winmodems in Linux....Suse has out-of-the-box support, so that was a piece of cake. I've also successfully installed drivers for it on Slackware and Vector (the latter is what I'm using right now) without any trouble.

I've tried twice so far to get it working in DSL, and both times the result has been immediate freeze of the system. The drivers were (apparently) successfully built using dev packages found in the myDSL repository (not the drivers, but the kernel sources, gnu-utils, etc). The /dev/ttyLT0 device node was created, chgrp'ed to dialout, and linked to /dev/modem. Drivers loaded successfully with insmod. PPP set up, run, and then freeze.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Sep. 02 2005,21:07

In the July 2005 issue, the UK's (and really the world's) premier Linux mag, Linux Format pitted DSL against most of the distros you listed, including Slax and several more.

The categories were speed, functionality, ease of use, flexibility, and some other stuff I can't remember. DSL came out on top in every category, by a large margin on many of them. Despite the fact that DSL was the smallest distro (they reviewed the fully-expanded version of MuLinux, and it's ancient anyway) in the roundup!

And, as far as I know, DSL is the last true minimalist desktop-oriented distro. We have kept fast to our principles of functionality first, minimal fluff, and we have never, nor will we, ever lift the 50mb ceiling for DSL's size.

Many of the other "minimalist" distros have swelled and grown into memory hogging monsters. Peanut, which was our chief competitor back in the day, is now a full 700mb CD! Slax uses KDE! FAT!!! MEMORY HOG!! Puppy is even draggy on my 2ghz box. I refuse to wait the 3-4 minutes it takes to boot on my older boxes, especially when DSL boots on my 100mhz/40mb ram/256mb CF-hdd box in far under 2 minutes. Luit, even if it's not dead, uses XFCE, which, while not NEARLY as fat as KDE, still uses 10x the ram that fluxbox does. Beatrix is even larger than Slax and uses Gnome, which is amost as bad on the ram as KDE! Zipslack, in it's 100mb chunkiness, doesn't even have X by default. Many of the others have grown to 64mb, or larger.

DSL offers much, if not all, of the functionality of these in a much tighter, sleeker package. DSL is the Ferrari of OSes. No other OS offers nearly the speed of DSL, and when you load DSL toram, we blow ourselves away!

Security with DSL is pretty much 100% bullet-proof. If you break something, just reboot and it's all back to normal, thanks to the magic of our frugal-install system.

There really is nothing out there that can compare with DSL. Believe me. I've looked.

-J.P.

Posted by clivesay on Sep. 02 2005,21:25

What he said

Posted by mcurtiss on Sep. 03 2005,21:22

Thanks to Mikshaw and Saiden for their replies.

I haven't searched the modem issue yet, but any new linux should support winmodems I would think since so many laptops use them. If the SUSE distro and some others can make them work, why can't DSL? Other option of course is to go out and buy a pcmcia modem, but not all older laptops have them.

Posted by mcurtiss on Sep. 03 2005,21:23

Posted by mikshaw on Sep. 03 2005,23:41

DSL *can* support them...the modules compile fine. The issue is what does it take to make it work? Maybe it means editing the module config files manually, or adding more libs or other files...so far I haven't figured it out.