As someone who has used the original DSL I'm delighted to see this project revived. The initial interface looks nicely familiar. For such a compact distro I think it looks great and certainly doesn't "feel" like it's missing any of the basic core stuff, with a pleasant interface on top.

One thing I noticed in the installer is an option to include changes made to the Live desktop session! Nice touch.

I did find in my case that the default terminal wouldn't launch (the urxvt one does though!) - I haven't read the other threads on here yet so that might already be covered. I'm testing this in VirtualBox on a Manjaro KDE host.

I'll experiment with this and let you know how I get on. This will be handy to have on a USB stick so I'll include it on my Ventoy ones.


P.S. I didn't see any mention of "minimum" system requirements, but it looks like it could run (at least for basic tasks) in less than 256MB of RAM? I'll have to experiment with that. I guess 64MB might be a bit too small, though!

I've recently installed DSL 2024 on an old Asus Home Server (intel Atom) - thanks to all for the very slick distro!

However, I have been having issues with the AntiX Control Center and FluxxBox menus where some tools stop opening. In particular, the Manage Packages button does not start the app, and the Terminal menu item doesn't start Terminal. Both worked after the initial install, but the Terminal stopped opening after a few uses, and Manage Packages stopped working shortly after.

There's a chance it happened after running an apt upgrade, but I'm not certain of the timing.

Restarting session, FluxxBox, and the machine don't seem to fix it.

I can start a Terminal through File Manager, however.

Anyone else run into this and/or have suggestions as to what I messed up?

Has anyone tried to install this on a ChromeBook? They are cheap and the specs should be plenty powerful enough.... Just something I've tossed around. Never tried it so not sure if it is possible.

Got an epiphany today! Can't understand why it didn't occur to me before. Well, as the saying goes here in Sweden: Better late than never! It was about to use Qemu in Windows to run DSL-2024. This is my first experience using Qemu. I thought it would be quite easy. But, man was I wrong! First the installation (a walk in the park since it was an .exe file), setting the PATH variable was anything but easy and then making Qemu boot DSL-2024 (the final step but it could really make a first time user of Qemu go insane). Well, making a long story short. The first time I ended up with a monochrome wallpaper and a 1024x800 resolution. I noticed why almost immediately. The system was running on 111 MB of RAM. It's amazing that anything at all showed up. I just didn't know how to allocate memory. After consulting mr Google quite a few times I got a wallpaper in color and 1280x800 in resolution. But it was almost impossible to use. Finally (what I'm posting from) I got the native resolution of the screen 1920x1080 and all in full color. There is a but though, (well several actually) it took about 10 minutes to boot, an hour to upgrade and is the slowest system I've ever used. I have to mention the silver lining though, the GUI is just awesome and it's a pleasure to see how Firefox looks even if it's incredible slow. Since it took the whole day to get to this point I have a hard time shutting it down and restart with more memory allocated. Have to work out how to get the GUI to get faster. I'm open to any suggestion how to speed things up.

// meo

This is my first post here and first post on any BB.


I am running a Dell 1501. with the following specs. 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: slow
RAM: 2GB (according to conky)
Screen: 1280x800 (according to conky)
Stock HDD about 110GBGB (according to conky)

I am a unix novice. I am a linux mint and windows 7 user. So my level of computer knowledge is low. Booting from installation media was without problems. I wanted to try a web browser with an email server, so I tried to launch badwolf and connect to proton, and I was expecting to be required to enable java script for that site. However, badwolf would not display anything to the screen. I tried some other sites and toggled some switches but nothing worked. By using dillo, I was able to get something to display, but with badwolf, nothing. I looked through the FAQ, but nothing struck me to try. I am using a linux mint system to send this. I did find a screen shot of badwolf running and there was a banner at the top, my system didn’t have one, and nothing I tried worked.

Since I am using the dell as a spreadsheet engine and gnumeric works good, I don’t need an immediate answer, but DSL runs well on the dell, so I would like to get this fixed.

John Kerschen

This machine won't put up a boot screen from physical IDE CD, USB boot, or USB CD drive.  Verified same issue with AntiX 23 runit i386 core.  Fought a day or so, put HD in another machine, installed AntiX core with extra .197 kernel + build tools (to build wifi module required for target machine.  Boots fine.  Battling other things (and more machines to test--have eeePC issues as well) but just a quick dump for now.  

I use both MPV and CMUS. They work very well although they spit out a lot of error messages. Especially Cmus has a very small footprint and can be used in the background writing texts in Abiword and searching the internet with Firefox. Had never used the MPV nor Cmus before but they are perfect if you want to have some music in the background while "working". Can you call it work if it is something you really like to do? A rhetorical question. A big hand for those two tiny programs!

// meo

I have installed DSL on a 64 Gb USB.  I have found the the boot time is about 10 Minutes on my SONY VAIO VGN SR-290J.  Same USB of DSL boots up within minutes on my HP 245 G6 laptop.  

That much of difference is there, in boot time. 

After initial boot the speed is pretty fast on both the laptops.

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.

   
Screenshot attached. This popped up when I booted in safe mode installed on VMware. Here it shows how DSL in 1280x786 looks like on a 13" HD screen. Thought it might be useful to see (the popup).

// meo