roberts
Group: Members
Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003 |
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Posted: Mar. 30 2006,04:48 |
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| Quote (mikshaw @ Mar. 29 2006,19:05) | Can't really say what's different unless we know what to compare it to. Most Linux distros are "normal", including DSL, but every distro has its little differences from every other distro. Your question really can't be answered unless you want to compare DSL to one particular other distro.
What I can say is that the most obvious differences between DSL and most other distros are...
1) Its package installation system is not package management...it will install but any uninstall is the user's problem.
2) If you run anything but a traditional harddrive install, the system is typically run in ram and so it requires files to be reinstalled on every boot. There are some exceptions to this.
3) Most included applications are the tiniest ones that could be found to do each task. |
Wow. I certainly would not answer like that!
First of all DSL is primarily a liveCD or Frugal type install, ie., a copy of the compressed read-only image.
Traditional hard drive install is not the focus of DSL at all. Over the past three years all of the improvements to DSL have been for the liveCD/Frugal environment.
That is the biggest difference between DSL and most other distros.
Now, a distro running from a compressed read-only image whether it is from a liveCD, sitting in ram, from a pendrive, Compact Flash, or even a hard disk partition runs partially in ram. Package managment is USELESS in this environment. There is no uninstall, just reboot and you always have a pristine known state of the OS. Reinstalling evey app, hardly, many automatic means to load these specially made extensions (packages). These "packages" are slimmed down to reduce their impacts on ram and are made exclusively for user dsl. I have never labelled them as packages, they are extensions.
Because, it is designed for such, the only natively writeable areas of the filesystem, is /opt and /home and a few other areas setup in ramdisk. The rest is mainly read-only. Using the write boot option or loading a .dsl extension automatically creates many symlinks allowing much more of the filesystem to be writeable.
Again, as the filesystem is running from compressed image and mostly read-only, many system files are placed in /opt. This allows for easy backup and restore, without overly burdening the use to constantly add files to the .filetool.lst ( the list-of-files to backup). Also many items that may normally be in rc.d are combined into these two files: /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig and /etc/init.d/dsl-config
Users can however choose to install to the hard drive in a traditional way. And thus can use a package managment system provided by Debian.
To compare the specially made DSL extensions made for the compressed image/ramdisk environment to that of packages ala traditional hard drive installed makes no sense.
There is even a warning on the website that dsl extensions are not made for traditionally hard drive installed systems. Let's keep these definitions clear.
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