Damn Small Linux 2024

Interesting fact is that DSL used to be 50MB because that’s how big a business-card sized CDs were. And yes, there used to be business-card sized CDs.

A truly damn small Linux is the xwoaf rebuild project 4.0 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pupngo.dk&#x2F;xwinflpy&#x2F;xwoaf_rebuild.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pupngo.dk&#x2F;xwinflpy&#x2F;xwoaf_rebuild.html</a><p>&gt;The forth version of xwoaf-rebuild is containing a lot of applications contained in only two binaries: busybox and mcb_xawplus. You get xcalc, xcalendar, xfilemanager, xminesweep, chimera, xed, xsetroot, xcmd, xinit, menu, jwm, desklaunch, rxvt, xtet42, torsmo, djpeg, xban2, text2pdf, Xvesa, xsnap, xmessage, xvl, xtmix, pupslock, xautolock and minimp3 via mcb_xawplus. And you get ash, basename, bunzip2, busybox, bzcat, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, extlinux, false, fdisk, fgrep, find, free, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hostname, id, ifconfig, init, insmod, kill, killall, klogd, ln, loadkmap, logger, login, losetup, ls, lsmod, lzmacat, mesg, mkdir, mke2fs, mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, mknod, mkswap, mount, mv, nslookup, openvt, passwd, ping, poweroff, pr, ps, pwd, readlink, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, test, top, touch, tr, true, tty, udhcpc, umount, uname, uncompress, unlzma, unzip, uptime, wc, which, whoami, yes, zcat via busybox. On top you get extensive help system, install scripts, mount scripts, configure scripts etc.<p>2.1mb <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo</a><p>Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that&#x27;s very dated

Fantastic to have another option with modern tools! great work that will be appreciated by many. Between this, Puppy, and Tiny Core Linux so much old hardware can be put to potential use. I’d also mention Finnix as an excellent rescue image solution. Any other awesome projects for limited hardware and Linux use that should be more well known?

Woah, now that&#x27;s a name I haven&#x27;t heard in a long time!<p>It says that it fits on a CD, but how about the other requirements? e.g. how much RAM is needed, and what kind of instruction set does the CPU need to support? is a 386 enough or do you need 486&#x2F;586&#x2F;686 level instructions?

Wow, this is crazy. I came across the DSL website last night while trying to figure out how to compile a minimal Linux kernel myself, and now here it is on HN! I used DSL back in high school when it was new.<p>As a side note, why does compiling Linux have to be so... obtuse? It just stops for me after several minutes of building out objects with no explanation.

I played around with DSL a lot back in 2009 or so, it ran great on old PCs I salvaged from the garbage.<p>&gt; Hats off to Puppy Linux for staying one of the few that still offer a full desktop environment in a small size.<p>Don&#x27;t forget SliTaz too, it&#x27;s still tiny:<p>&gt; Root filesystem taking up about 100 MB and ISO image of less than 40 MB.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slitaz.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slitaz.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a>

I used DSL back around when it was released (and 64 MiB flash drives were common) to get around my school&#x27;s network filtering. I think this was one of the reasons they hired new IT staff the following year, because the technique caught on even with the non-nerdy crowd.

I remember DSL fondly. It was a marvel then, and maybe now in retrospect even moreso -- that so much functionality could be packed into such a small footprint.<p>Conceptually the need still exists today, even if the whole landscape has changed in the meantime. I&#x27;ll look forward to trying this out!

I just checked Wikipedia, and was surprised to see the original DSL only had releases for about 3.5 years.<p>&gt; Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002<p>If you go all the way back to 2002, 50 MB for an old computer wasn&#x27;t that small. I bought a new computer with 192 MB of RAM as late as 2005. My 32-bit, $400 discount laptop from 2009 has 4 GB of RAM, so 700 MB is reasonable.

I&#x27;d put this dillo fork:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dillo-browser&#x2F;dillo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dillo-browser&#x2F;dillo</a><p>On games, sgt-puzzles and bsdgames fit well, among nethack&#x2F;slashem, DCSS and OFC Frotz too plus a few libre games (Spiritwrak and such). Slashem+BSDGames+3 adventures for Frotz would weight less than 20MB I think. Compressed, about 7.<p>BTW, I&#x27;d ditch XMMS for Audacious; a Pentium 3&#x2F;4 today would be more than enough to run it.<p>BTW Visidata it&#x27;s huge, use sc-im+Gnuplot.<p>On browsers, felinks supports Gopher and Gemini too. Gopher has nice stuff as gopher:&#x2F;&#x2F;magical.fish, Gemini has similar places too.

What a throwback.<p>This was the only distro that I could fit on a memory stick, which were novel at the time (and memory was $$$ if you can believe that).<p>I stuck this into a machine I made from parts I found at our recycling center, and threw them in a shoebox.<p>Good times.

Downloading at ~100KB&#x2F;s... hitting the front page of HN is probably a good usecase for bittorrent.

Nice to know DSL is still alive. It&#x27;s been stagnant for many years, isn&#x27;t it?<p>I still remember running it in computer lab around 2006-2007 for fun. At that time, the PC was dual boot: Windows XP and Debian.<p>Wonder why now the ISO is significantly much bigger: greater than 600 MB? It used to be like 50 MB or less.

The &quot;damn small&quot; linux has 2 windows managers and 3 browsers.<p>Doesn&#x27;t look like it&#x27;s small, looks like it&#x27;s a collection of things the author enjoys.

I had the Linux kernel and some simple user-space tools like busybox running on an embedded platform with 512 kB RAM and 2MB flash back in 1999! Those were fun times. To be honest 512 kb was possible but very on the limit, I think the product we launched with it had a few megs of RAM eventually. We had to invent a journalling flash filesystem as well in order to make it work in practice, something that didn&#x27;t exist back then either. But Linux then was really a breakthrough compared to the horrible mess of embedded OSes that were needed otherwise to handle TCP&#x2F;IP, filesystems and multitasking.

I remember this being one of my very first distros when I started using Linux, probably because of its very attractive name like many did here.<p>However what moved me away from it was the sudden abandoment due to the fallout between a primary contributor and the project&#x27;s leader, to which the former made the focal point on his distrowatch interview, he would later create his own distro called TinyCoreLinux.<p>In my opinion this a fruitless attempt to restore any credibility that the project lead has lost after over a decade of negligence and abandoment.

Also by using Musl and Alpine as a base the amount of software you can put in 700MB it&#x27;s huge.<p>With 700MB, IceWM and ZZZFM you could fit half a CD even with all the X.org drivers installed and you could fit Abiword, Gnumeric, Seamonkey, Dillo and so on with ease.<p>Offering an alternative with Linux-Libre will be interesting too, as often the Libre kernel works faster than the vanilla one, and legacy computers have all the drivers working. Propietary drivers won&#x27;t work anymore such as Nvidia which some of the older ones might not even compile with DKMS.

For those who had to search it, &quot;Badwolf&quot; is a Webkit based browser.

Damn small Linux was the first Linux I could actually use as a child&#x2F;adolescent because the downloaded zip file included a copy of QEMU.exe (and a .BAT file to boot DSL) that I could use to get a taste of Linux with no prior experience, using a Windows computer. Growing up in Redmond WA, home of Microsoft, it felt very subversive to young me to use a non-windows operating system. I&#x27;m forever thankful for that seemingly random include in the download; I probably wouldn&#x27;t have become the person I am without it.

&gt; DSL 2024 currently only ships with two window managers: Fluxbox and JWM. Both are lightweight, fairly intuitive, and easy to use.<p>I wonder what they will move to once they have to start using Wayland. Is there a lightweight, user-friend, and stable compositor ? (My experience is that you can choose two, but not three).

Wow, this submission has fantastic timing for me.<p>I have been looking for a minimal linux distribution to run under qemu, so I&#x27;ve been shopping in this small distro market.<p>I really like &#x27;tiny core&#x27; best so far in terms of functionality &#x2F; size, but I would love to not have to backbend to get it to persist to disk.

Great memories of the original DSL. New one looks great at a glance, really nice collection of applications. Blown away they managed to fit all that on a CD. From the page, it sounds like they did a lot of work to make it happen.<p>Really cool stuff. Might stick this on an old laptop when I get home.

I was looking for a lightweight OS to run on old Asus Eee PC 1005 HA, which uses a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 processor. I installed Void Linux (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;voidlinux.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;voidlinux.org&#x2F;</a>).<p>I may give DSL 2024 a try and see how it compares.

&gt; Dillo (super-light GUI browser)<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38847613">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38847613</a><p>I don&#x27;t know if DSL has updated to use that version yet, but thanks again to rodarima for picking that up!

AbiWord seems like an odd choice for a word processor— it seems to be virtually obsolete.

Cool! DSL replaced LNX-BBC for me some time in 2005. Glad to see development has resumed.<p>In a similar vein, I think there&#x27;s a Slackware-based release of Slax again!<p>(posting this from a ThinkPad T61 running Slackware 15)

Love this distro, its the only one that loads fast on web x86 emulation. Sad that they&#x27;re upping the size but 700mb is still leagues smaller then most other distros.

Holy fucking shit my childhood.<p>Damn Small Linux was my first introduction to Linux because it was the only thing I could download in ~4 hours on dialup without hogging the phones all day long.<p>I will have to fire this up and have a damn good time.

I like Fluxbox, it&#x27;s really simple and doesn&#x27;t get in your way.

Wonder whether it is easy to run this on m1&#x2F;2 using qemu

A good choice to run a simple application in a container?

thank you for sharing, but surprised they are offering a direct download link instead of a torrent, they are bound to get slashdotted.

What are some use cases of Damn Small Linux?

Website is offline :&#x2F;

666 MB iso

They need to rename it... drives aren&#x27;t that much larger since DSL was 50mb

high-end <i>CPUs</i> have more <i>cache</i> than that !

when i visit the site, it says the the account is suspended. anyone else experiences the same problem or is it just me?

<i>Account Suspended</i><p><i>Please contact your hosting provider to correct issues causing your website to be offline.</i>

badwolf... light?? It is a webkit based browser, come on...

&gt; keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills<p>while i like this idea in theory, in practice the energy efficiency and lower electricity costs of newer hardware mean that in terms of both cost and environmental impact it would probably be better to recycle the old hardware and buy something new in most cases.