Linux Blast From the Past: Damn Small Linux

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LambdaCalculus

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Published on November 2, 2021 1:19:32 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eGXQnYZhms

Duration: 10:26

240 views

7

Damn Small Linux is a Linux distro from the early 2000s, meant to be a small, versatile desktop system contained within 50MB. It accomplishes this by using smaller programs and utilities, a smaller X window manager (either jwm or Fluxbox), and version 2.4 of the Linux kernel (versus the larger 2.6 kernel). DSL can also run as a live system, and can fit entirely within RAM in that case (if you had minimum 128MB). It was also able to run on 486 systems, and it could be installed to a hard drive with a "frugal" install option (a cloop image that can't be directly modified) or as a normal install (full OS).


This video is a small exploration of those older days of early to mid 00s Linux; this DSL install is a full HDD install, running in qemu-system-i386 6.1.0 hosted on Debian-testing amd64. I had previously installed a few extension packages in this setup. This video is mostly just to show off what DSL looked like and a couple of things that can be done with it; I'll probably do another video later that more extensively explores DSL and what it can do.


DISCLAIMER: that weird sound you may hear in the background during the SNES emulator bit is known; I didn't get sound properly working in this setup so you just hear that awful warble instead.


More info about Damn Small Linux:

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux

Main project page: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Project wiki: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/


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Music in the background:


Aphex Twin - "Pulsewidth", "Aegispolis", "I"
(from the album "Selected Ambient Works 85-92")