02-15-2024, 08:49 PM
This is my first post here and first post on any BB in long time, so hello everybody!
First, I tested DSL 2024 in VirtualBox, but later I decided to do proper testing on real hardware. For testing I used around 17 year old HP TC4400. It's barely usable with normal Linux, so I was curious to see how it'll perform with DSL. Here are it's specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 2x1,8Ghz
RAM: 2GB DDR2
Screen: 1024x768, 12'
Stock HDD was replaced with 120GB SSD.
Installation
---
Booting from installation media wasn't without problems. Booting in normal mode caused X server to crash and go into some sort of boot loop. Unfortunately, because it was live session, I couldn't retrieve any log files, but this problem seems very similar to one described here: https://damnsmalllinux.org/forums/thread-9.html. After booting using safe mode installation was flawless. Problem with X never occured on installed OS, in fact, I'm writing this post from DSL installed on said notebook.
First post-install impressions
--
I disabled automatic login, so after booting I was greeted with logging screen. It wasn't beautiful but did it's job. Default Fluxbox desktop looks nice and it's quite intuitive and lightweight - RAM usage around 100MB in stock system is something I last saw in Lubuntu 14.something (if I exclude Xless server installs). Wifi card was detected, I was easly able to connect to my Wi-Fi network - conman window appeared automatically after login. I think this is good thing, because there is not network icon in the tray.
Overall system feels snappy, but I was curious what BadWolf browser can do on these specs. After using it for a while I can say that it's nice that it includes switch to disable JS. It can really help browse the Web on slow hardware. Overall I think it's a good choice for this distro - you can browse javascript-less Web without sites being broken by insufficient CSS support like in Dillo, which is also included in default install.
What's also not included is GTK3 theme and any icon set, which results in missing icon symbols all over the system and BadWolf blasting my eyes with white background where the rest of the system is in rather dark color scheme. But this isn't something that one apt install couldn't fix, but then you are losing default look.
Coming to the end of this lengthy post I think the alpha release of DSL is nice base for great distro for making potato computers slightly less potato. Of course there are rough edges - like when I try switch theme in JWM it didn't work - but this was most straightforward lightweight Linux distro installation ever (not counting Xorg crashing in live session), maybe second to Q4OS with Trinity. No 2137 editions/flavours, no 200 preinstalled programs. Just simple distro that you can install and get at least some job done, even on 20 year old pc.
I will try to reproduce that X server crash and retrive logs somehow, maybe it'll help solve that problem for future releases.
First, I tested DSL 2024 in VirtualBox, but later I decided to do proper testing on real hardware. For testing I used around 17 year old HP TC4400. It's barely usable with normal Linux, so I was curious to see how it'll perform with DSL. Here are it's specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 2x1,8Ghz
RAM: 2GB DDR2
Screen: 1024x768, 12'
Stock HDD was replaced with 120GB SSD.
Installation
---
Booting from installation media wasn't without problems. Booting in normal mode caused X server to crash and go into some sort of boot loop. Unfortunately, because it was live session, I couldn't retrieve any log files, but this problem seems very similar to one described here: https://damnsmalllinux.org/forums/thread-9.html. After booting using safe mode installation was flawless. Problem with X never occured on installed OS, in fact, I'm writing this post from DSL installed on said notebook.
First post-install impressions
--
I disabled automatic login, so after booting I was greeted with logging screen. It wasn't beautiful but did it's job. Default Fluxbox desktop looks nice and it's quite intuitive and lightweight - RAM usage around 100MB in stock system is something I last saw in Lubuntu 14.something (if I exclude Xless server installs). Wifi card was detected, I was easly able to connect to my Wi-Fi network - conman window appeared automatically after login. I think this is good thing, because there is not network icon in the tray.
Overall system feels snappy, but I was curious what BadWolf browser can do on these specs. After using it for a while I can say that it's nice that it includes switch to disable JS. It can really help browse the Web on slow hardware. Overall I think it's a good choice for this distro - you can browse javascript-less Web without sites being broken by insufficient CSS support like in Dillo, which is also included in default install.
What's also not included is GTK3 theme and any icon set, which results in missing icon symbols all over the system and BadWolf blasting my eyes with white background where the rest of the system is in rather dark color scheme. But this isn't something that one apt install couldn't fix, but then you are losing default look.
Coming to the end of this lengthy post I think the alpha release of DSL is nice base for great distro for making potato computers slightly less potato. Of course there are rough edges - like when I try switch theme in JWM it didn't work - but this was most straightforward lightweight Linux distro installation ever (not counting Xorg crashing in live session), maybe second to Q4OS with Trinity. No 2137 editions/flavours, no 200 preinstalled programs. Just simple distro that you can install and get at least some job done, even on 20 year old pc.
I will try to reproduce that X server crash and retrive logs somehow, maybe it'll help solve that problem for future releases.