Solo Technology

Earlier today I was wondering aloud if there’s a simple little utility that I could use to easily save/recover data without worrying about viruses and cooties and such.  Perhaps I have my answer: Damn Small Linux(aka DSL). I just got done playing with this little “micro” distribution and am quite blown away. (yeah, once again I’m a bit behind the times!) It would appear that DSL will serve the need nicely. I think — I have one more little test to make sure it’ll see my various USB drives. It saw, and initialized, my USB Ethernet card so I have high hopes.

What is it? Here’s the buzz:

DSL is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution.

Damn Small is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:

• Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
• Boot from a USB pen drive
• Boot from within a host operating system (that’s right, it can run *inside* Windows)
• Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call “frugal install”
• Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
• Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
• Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
• Modularly grow — DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize

All that, and the bag of chips. It made my little xubuntu laptop just simply fly! In fact, I decided to switch my window manager over to fluxbox as that seemed to be a bit more lightweight than Xfce. Maybe? Still experimenting there. Ok, so it kinda defeats the purpose of xubuntu, but oh well…

Next up is to see if I can boot desktop PCs from an installation of DSL on my 60GB external USB drive. That’d be the backup solution I was looking for earlier today.

What’s a bummer? The included Firefox is version 1.06. That’s a bit behind the times. However, I’m told there’s a way to add additional software or update versions. I have some reading to do yet on that subject. A rather petty bummer, but it’s really the only thing I noticed that I didn’t like.

All in all, this is looking like it’ll be a very handy addition to the toolbox.

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