lagerratrobe
Group: Members
Posts: 50
Joined: Dec. 2005 |
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Posted: Dec. 28 2005,17:25 |
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I've had DSL 2.0 installed to the HD of my Dell Inspiron 3200 laptop for a little over 6 weeks and I think I'm finally able to verbalize my feelings about the distro. Is DSL the final answer in my quest for a small, fast Linux distro? The answer unfortunately is no, but a qualified "no". DSL *will* be the first distro I turn to when I need a capable Linux installation up and running immediately. It just won't be the one that I run for a long time on my personal workstation.
The distro is amazingly small and performs well, especially on older hardware which becomes sluggish with large, full-featured distros that use traditional window managers like Gnome and KDE. All of the applications which come with DSL work quickly and efficiently and in my opinion are some of the best apps I've used. Hats off to using Sylpheed, for example. It's the best email client I've seen in a long time. Beaver is another application that I'll continue to use when I'm looking for a WYSIWYG editor. Where DSL falls flat on its arse though, is in the installation of new applications, particularly applications compiled and installed from source code.
Although 3 mechanisms exist for installing new apps; mydsl, apt-get, and source code compilation/install; none of them work particularly well imho, especially when DSL is run in a HD install. I'll give a brief rundown of my experiences with each below, starting with mydsl.
The mydsl package manager is a good idea in general, but feels unfinished. The need to be logged in as user "dsl" to install new apps makes it particularly frustrating to use in a multiuser environment. Although the tool can be invoked from the command line, allowing you to "su dsl" and install extensions from any user account on the system, this feature is trumped by the need to manually copy desktop icons and program links from the "dsl" account into yours after the installation is complete before being able to use them. It seems that mydsl is intended to those that run DSL from CD or other removable media, but it's a shame that it can't be a bit more flexible. Gripes about its administrative qualities aside though, the applications available via mydsl have all worked well, and are all recent enough versions to be useful additions to my system. Too bad there aren't more applications which have been ported to the mydsl repository, but it's easy to see how that will always be a moving target.
Moving on to apt-get, the traditional Debian package manager, my results with it have been mixed as well. First and foremost, the DSL specification of "oldstable" as the default release version is ludicrous. Using apt-get in that mode *will and does* cause problems rapidly, as apt-get will lower the versions of your libraries. Users of apt-get are well advised to update the release version to "stable", after which it seems to work as one would generally expect. As the makers of DSL say though, DSL is not pure Debian, and you can expect some things installed via apt-get not to work.
Finally we're to the thorn in my side. The straw that will get me to replace my DSL installation sometime this week. I speak of course of the joys inherent to compiling and installing from source code. Never something that is truly pleasant, even after close to 10 years of using Linux, in DSL it is a truly miserable experience. As SaidinUnleashed states so succinctly in his 'Compiling Problems and DSL' post, "DSL, being a minimalist distro is not exactly a friendly environment for compiling programs."
Amen Brother!
In most of the other distros I've used, like say Slackware for example, there are "Development" options available that can be loaded to provide support for compilation of source code. In DSL, although there are some utilities, like gcc and gtk2+ available, my experience has been that they are incomplete and that one rapidly enters dependency hell nightmares. Don't believe me? Just try installing the latest version of Audacity from source and you'll see what I mean. Even with the mydsl extensions loaded that are supposed to meet the requirements, you end up trying to make up shortcomings with either apt-get, or by downloading and trying to install more source code. I believe the final straw for me came when I could not get a perl module with compiled C code, XML::Parser, installed properly due to problems with gcc and make This after even using apt-get to install a new version of perl, and perl-modules, make, and gcc, and then manually building expat. Pffft! No thanks, enough is enough.
To sum up what has become somewhat of a rant. Do I like DSL? You bet, it's the easiest Linux distro I have ever installed, and it works pretty damn well right out of the CD. Linux fortunately or unfortunately is still an OS that requires one to hunt out and find the software that one needs or wants to use. That's the devil-headed beauty of it. Bill Gates isn't deciding what applications we should use, and because of the availability of open source software, just about any conceivable application is available for a Linux user to try. Not being able to dip into that resource while running DSL is a bit of a disappointment.
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