DamnSmallLinux Comes of Age & Linux From Scratch

Late last week, DamnSmallLinux finally made the plunge from beta to full release, with v1.0.1 hitting the servers. I’d been using v0.9.3 for some time, and wasn’t really expecting a great deal of difference, but had decided to make the move as soon as it came out of v1.0rc(x) status. For those unfamiliar, rc(x) is short for release candidate number (x), and indicates that the version is nearly ready for primetime release, just needs a few edges smoothed.

Though I’m running up-to-date hardware, have vast untouched plains of disk space and plenty of RAM for any realistic application, I usually find myself using DSL, though I have remasted the CD (more on that in a moment) and installed it to hard drive.

This is despite the fact that I have top draw distros like SimplyMEPIS, Ubuntu, Mandrake 10.1 to name a few. Of that lot, I only have MEPIS installed on my main box, though my second box has Ubuntu alongside DSL. Why?

First of all is that DSL offers 90% of what I need from a distro, and does it in a trim, no-bloat fashion. My window manager of choice for day-to-day operations is FluxBox–which DSL uses–I spend a fair bit of time using the Dillo and links browsers, and I’m positively addicted to Sylpheed as a mail client, having switched to it 100% for all email accounts.

The main additions I made in remastering were AbiWord, as I prefer a word-processor with a bit more oomph, a couple of games, gnu-utils, xchat and the like.

With v1.0.1 came a menu selection, Apps>>Tools>>Make myDSL CD remaster, which allows you to add to the base DSL distro via apt-get, Synaptic (Apps>>Tools>>Synaptic) or the MyDSL icon on the desktop which shows packages that have been optimized for use with DSL. Simply select the remaster menu item, follow a couple of simple instructions, pop a blank CD in your CDRW drive and voila’! Instant custom LiveCD distro.

For all that I really, REALLY like DSL, I cannot in good conscience recommend it to everyone. It’s not really a beginner’s distro, unless that beginner is either computer-savvy or stubborn enough to overcome the (admittedly small, but significant) learning curve that FluxBox will present a Windows-weary warrior. For people who have little computer background, or extremely low frustration levels, Ubuntu/Kubuntu still strike me as the best option.

Though I do have plans to move on to bigger–not necessarily better–distros, DSL’s probably always going to have a home on my boxes. In fact, the only reason I have either MEPIS or Ubuntu on either box at this time is because DSL is based on the Linux kernel v2.4.26, and I’m in the early-middle stages of installing Linux From Scratch (http://linuxfromscratch.org), which requires kernel v2.6.2 or later, and also requires gcc 3.0+, a feature also missing in DSL, in the interest of saving space.

Linux From Scratch is not precisely a Linux distribution. Rather, it’s an ebook (available for free) that gives step-by-step instructions on how to construct a basic Linux OS from the vanilla source code. There are several reasons a person might wish to do this, all explained in the book’s introduction, but my main reason is as a learning vehicle. While I can claim some knowledge of various distros and a bit more knowledge of such things as window managers, my knowledge of Linux’s innards is sadly lacking, and I freely admit gaping holes in some areas (e.g., networking–a shortcoming that I’m addressing these days, now that we’re a mult-computer family). LFS seems at least as suitable for this sort of masochistic self-tutorial than a stage 1 Gentoo installation (which I shall also be assaying directly). LFS can be purchased, and comes with a CD of the source code needed to compile and construct a Linux OS, or the CD iso can be downloaded free of charge.

If you’re wanting to learn how Linux works, as well as gain knowledge in its commands, this is undoubtably a good way to go. Not necessarily easy, but thorough.