roberts
Group: Members
Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003 |
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Posted: April 01 2007,17:14 |
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Let me state that I have no interest in making DSL a rescue tool. There are already many such distributions out there. Some, in fact, were originally based on DSL.
Nor will DSL become a Debian hard drive installer. Debian already supplies that.
DSL will not compromise its Linux/Unix roots and run everything as user root just to try to accomodate those less familiar or unwilling to learn the *nix way of running an OS, or because it is easier.
At minimum DSL will retain its niche in the sea of distributions. That being not only a physically small nomadic, yet easily extendable, distribution, but one that runs well and supports very small hardware. That is the direction that I have provided to DSL with my development efforts.
Debian compatibility and traditional hard drive installations have been secondary. Again, there are many other distributions that have that as their focus.
As the developer, "I eat my own dog food". In other words, I use DSL as my primary OS. Over the years that I have maintained this OS, I have tried to keep DSL true to John's 50MB Desktop OS concept. I am also keenly aware of supporting old(er) hardware, and of being true to a nomadic well behaved guest OS, either booting natively or via emulation. I am very much drawn to the "Small is Beautiful" concept.
DSL will not become so stripped to be not useful to me upon first boot. Yet there are some applications that over time have become less useful and I too, often mydsl overlay them. Example firefox 1.0.6 and xpdf. These two could be possibly removed in favor of their mydsl counterparts, or perhaps the more capable, but larger versions, be added but then exceeding the 50MB limit. Most of the other applications present in DSL do not have such issues and I find that they serve their function very well. If you wish to comment or suggest others feel free to do so.
Recently, During this v3.3 RC cycle, I tried to remove the non-boot scsi modules and offer them as download extensions. Really, how many of us still have or use old sccsi drives. In fact, I do. Daily, I use an old scsi tape drive to backup my development system. Yet, I was still thinking to remove them. Doing so is a savings of almost 2MB. Yet this seemed to be rejected.
I also tried to remove the netfilter modules and package them with the iptables.unc. Again, we are carrying modules that cannot be used without the appropriate program, iptables, a mydsl extension. Yet there were complaints.
There is an old saying, it is easy to give, but so hard to take away; even when you still make it available.
As for my recent push to publish many many enhancements for DSL over the last several months, well that will become very apparent later this month when a major annoucement will be made.
I appreciate the comments and voting. After v3.3 is final, looks like I will be looking to implement 2.4.34. Likely our usebase is here because of DSL's support on smaller and/or older hardware, thin clients, or embedded devices. I will continue to strive to keep up.
I look forward to continued interaction with those who share my interests and enthusiasm for the little OS that could ( and does!)
Robert
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