Tried installing DSL2024 March version from a CD on a Toshiba Satellite L305 with 2GB RAM and 2GHz CPU. Failed twice with the same Fatal Error below. Same DSL2024 CD installed fine on an old HP7955 desktop so I think the CD is fine. Same laptop HDD already has Zorin 16, Zorin 15 and Windows 10 working fine.

"Fatal Error

Could not find file antiX/linuxfs

Searched devices: /dev/sdb  /dev/sr0

Searched types: usb, cd


Please contact Bitjam at DSL forums"

Any ideas on how to get around this other than wiping the HDD and trying again?

Thanks in advance!

So, my system has 8GB RAM... Conky is showing 2.63GB  Not sure what is going on... ?

Spent some time doing various installs, long story short, trying to use btrfs and encryption (manual partition) does not appear to work, system hangs on boot and I suspect it's looking for a decrypt key, but can't find one, and is not prompting for it.  For now, installed it to a usb drive ext4 encrypted, and will continue to test.

I removed BadWolf and installed Firefox-esr and Netsurf. Badwolf is fantastic, but it may be too minimal for a general-purpose distribution like DSL. Firefox can be pretty RAM-intensive, so I also included the thrifty GTK version of Netsurf. I switched the default GTK theme over to the dark BlackBird, which works with both GTK2 and GTK3 applications. I updated 115 packages to come in line with the current release of antiX and fixed a few bugs.

https://damnsmalllinux.org/2024-download.html

i was wondering would you be experimenting with gentoo, arch32 or slackware? i know dsl is based on debian but i thought i ask?

Well since I couldn't install DSL-2024 on my resurrected netbook I did the second best and installed the last version of antix. Just installed it and it looks great. Will test it further.

// meo

Hi again John!

This try went better. Also booting from USB in safe video mode but I changed the safe for fbdev and then I got the right resolution, 1024x600 and it looks very good. Tried to install but the installation medium check told me the medium was corrupt so I didn't pursue it. Skipping the test would probably result in being able to install. Haven't decided yet but so far it has been a very pleasant experience. I think Badwolf is a good choice for the distro by the way.

// meo

I've always been an admirer of DSL and John and the folks who have done such a great job with the product over the years.

But with DSL 2024, I think I need to understand better -- why would someone use DSL 2024, versus alternatives like antiX or Puppy?

If it's a matter of distro size and computer resources, antiX and Puppy both run very comfortably on early dual-core computers (those made circa 2005-7). 

I'm not sure I see a niche for another distro that "runs on old computers" unless DSL 2024 targets single core processors.

Or are there other features or benefits that will distinguish DSL 2024?

Thank you for your responses.

I selected Badwolf as the default browser because it seems to have low ram use compared to other HTML5 browsers and has a relatively small footprint.

I would really like some feedback on people's experience with it.  I think some folks are missing how to enable JavaScript.  For those of you installing DSL are you using Badwolf or are you quickly switching over to something like Firefox?

I am curious about people's preferences when it comes to window managers in DSL.  I am fairly partial to Fluxbox, but maybe more people prefer JWM.  If you would like to see something else, let me know.  Keep in mid though that what ever is in DSL should have a small footprint.