Skip to main content

Damn Small Linux (DSL)

I'm trying to help my friend fix his Dell OptiPlex GX400, which is running Windows XP Home, and is probably owned. It only has 128 MB of RAM, and it turns out this particular model uses expensive 128MB PC-800 Rambus RIMM for Dell RAM Memory. So, it doesn't make sense to buy a chip, really, and none of my spares will probably fit.

Instead of throwing hardware at the problem, I looked at Damn Small Linux (DSL information) To burn a CD of Damn Small Linux, Download the ISO and then burin it to a CD, in Windows, with InfraRecorder (GPL).

DSL is based on Knoppix, but is stripped down to a bare bones set of Debian packages. As promised, booting DS from the CD transformed the slow, almost unusable computer into a speed demon. Plus, DSL shows system resource use right on the desktop, and we could see that it was hardly using any RAM -- less than 20% of 128 MB.

Now all we have to do is figure out a way to save the configuration, and configure networking.

Labels:

Comments

R-Whited said…
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Persistence

There you go!
5:38 PM, March 05, 2010
Eduard said…
I installed Damn Small Linux 4.11RC2 in a Compaq Presario 2292.
I am now using this computer as a web server!

I wrote some tips and tricks on how to install Damn Small Linux 4.11RC2 and use it as a web server, that you can find in:

http://cosmolinux.no-ip.org/dsl/dsl.html

I wish it is helpful to someone!!!
8:38 AM, August 21, 2013
Neil said…
@Eduard, great blog post on DSL! Thanks for the link - I learned a few things from your excellent step-by-step instructions.
1:06 PM, August 28, 2013
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Joomla 1.5 Directory Status: Writeable

[UPDATED] Joomla 1.5 is acting flaky on one of our installations because the directories are set to ‘unwriteable’. To see the their current state, log in as Super Administrator and go to Help > System Info > Directory Permissions . Elsewhere, it's been suggested that the specified directories must be set to “world-writeable” (777). This works, but it is a very bad idea , since it means anyone can change your files! Not cool. Fixing Security with User and Group Settings To perform these changes, you need shell (command line) access to your server. If you don't have it, you can beg your host to make these changes for you, or switch to a Joomla-friendly host. I'm going to assume that you are using a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server because if you're not, then ... well, these instructions should work in principle, but the specifics for your server may be quite different. Here's the issue: you, the FTP user, need full access to your files. So does Joomla,...
13 comments
Read more

Essential Firefox Add-Ons For the Cloud

If you don't want to be tied down to a desktop, you need direct access to your computer in the cloud. Since Firefox runs just about everywhere, it's a good place to start to set up a reliable way to access your accounts. Blog & Social  Delicious Bookmarks is the recommended and official Firefox add-on for Delicious, the world's leading social bookmarking service (formerly del.icio.us). It integrates your bookmarks and tags with Firefox and keeps them in sync for easy, convenient access. Syncing slows down startup, though. ScribeFire Blog Editor is a blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. They've also integrated their affiliate Quick Ads advertising program, which I haven't tried.
Post a Comment
Read more

Virus scan Windows using a Linux live CD

[There's been quite a bit of interest in this post and I've expanded on it quite a bit. Please post any comments or questions to help me improve this guide. - Neil] Keith and I have both run into situations where we want to recover a Windows computer by cleaning it up with a Linux Live (bootable) CD distro. This offers several advantages to cleaning up an infected or compromised computer by booting into Windows: It prevents the malware, if it exists, from jumping from the infected computer or partition we are trying to fix to the repair partition or boot medium. If we boot from a CD, there's actually no way to alter the boot medium, since it's read-only. Naturally, we started with Knoppix -- download it here . Installing and scanning with F-Prot is covered in this Knoppix.net discussion thread, Virus Scan from LiveCD , which describes how to install F-Prot from the command line using apt-get. Also, In Knoppix 5.1, you can boot from the Knoppix CD and install F-P...
20 comments
Read more