Damn Small Linux has come a long way through its releases. The latest version, though still built on a 2.4 kernel, is just plain sweet. The 50MB Live Disk gives you a good tour of its basic features. It is very fast if you run it in RAM. Adding myDSL extensions gives the user the option of even loading optional packages. In this area you'll find cool stuff like games, Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice, ABIWord, etc. But, I don't want to have my girls run from a Live Disk all of the time. They like being able to save and reconfigure stuff. And, quite frankly, I don't want to have to leave one of my more modern CDROMs stuck in their machine.
Luckily DSL supports a couple of different install options for putting in on the harddrive. I chose to do the 50MB install (which runs in RAM) and extend it using myDSL.
Here's the rough outline of what I did (not including various reboots for testing components as I configured them):
- Get a 50MB DSL CD burnt and verify that it booted in the machine and that the base Live CD worked fine.
- Fired up fdisk (or you could use cfdisk or gparted or you other favorite) and set up my harddisk partitions:
/dev/hda1 50MB ext2
/dev/hda2 1024MB linux swap
/dev/hda3 Remaining ext2 - I also used mkfs to put on filesystems:
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hda1
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hda3 - I then booted up DSL and used "Apps->Tools->Install to Hard Drive" from the menu to install the OS. I chose to use grub, since it seems to have better features than LILO.
- Using download through the bulti-in myDSL browser, I added a bunch of myDSL packages to /mnt/hda3:
XFree86.dsl
jre1_5_0.uci
aumix.dsl
samba.dsl
codecpak.dsl
xcalc.dsl
dosbox.dsl
xine.dsl
firefox-1.5.0.6.uci
xpdf-3.01pl2.uci
gtk2-0705.dsl - I added more packages that I only want to use sometimes. The "sometimes" class got moved into /mnt/hda3/optional folder. This is an important step if you have limited RAM like I did. Packages in this folder only get loaded from the menu by the user. In this case, for my daughters, I installed a lot of games. Here are my optional packages:
Ultima-AOD.tar.gz
opera9.uci
Ultima-AOE.tar.gz
toppler.dsl
Ultima-AOE.tar.gz.md5.txt
abiword.dsl
tuxtype.dsl
billard-gl.dsl
xasteroids.tar.gz
bittorrent-cli.dsl
xboing.dsl
bittorrent-gui.dsl
xbubble.tar.gz
bugsquish.dsl
xf86config.dsl
circuslinux.dsl
xgalaga.dsl
eboard.dsl
xgammon.dsl
freeciv.dsl
xmahjongg.tar.gz
gcompris2.dsl
xmame.dsl
gimp-1.2.dsl
xpat2.dsl
mathwar.dsl
xpuyopuyo.dsl - Edit the boot sequence in /cdrom/boot/grub/menu.1st, as given below. The host= sets the hostname. The restore= sets up restoration of settings. The mydsl= sets up the pointer to the mydsl packages. Don't let the name fool you -- /cdrom is actually the cd image that you installed in step 4.
title DSL
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal nodhcp acpi apm dma noscsi host=matador restore=hda3 mydsl=hda3 frugal
initrd /boot/minirt24.gz - I setup XFree86 to get a little better graphic performance. Install the xf86config package and run xf86config. I saved the output file to /home/dsl/.xfree86/XF86Config-4.
- Edit /home/dsl/.xserverrc to move from Xvesa to XFree86, leaving the line for XVesa in case I need it:
# XVesa Config
#exec /usr/bin/X11/Xvesa -mouse /dev/psaux,5 -screen 1024x768x16 -shadow -nolisten tcp -I &>/dev/null
# XFree86 Config
exec sudo /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 -nolisten tcp -xf86config ~/.xfree86/XF86Config-4 - Edit the .xinitrc to set up lots of things. Here is my edited version with some notes.
# put X windows programs that you want started here.
# Be sure to add at the end of each command the &
KEYTABLE="$(getknoppixparam.lua KEYTABLE)"
DESKTOP="$(getoption.lua $HOME/.desktop wm)"
ICONS="$(getoption.lua $HOME/.desktop icons)"
# For non-US Keyboards
if [ ${KEYTABLE:0:2} != "us" ]; then
xmodmap -e "clear Mod4" -e "add Mod5 = Mode_switch" &
fi
#if egrep -qv noicons /proc/cmdline 2>/dev/null; then
if [ "$ICONS" == 1 ]; then
for x in `ls -1 .xtdesktop/*.hide 2>/dev/null`; do rm -f ${x%.*}; done
iconsnap.lua &>/dev/null &
xtdesk.sh
fi
Here I got rid of the default startup help:
#eliminate startup help
#dillo /usr/share/doc/dsl/getting_started.html &>/dev/null &
Here I mounted my raid:
#Mount the Raid
sudo mkdir /mnt/raid &> /dev/null &
sudo /usr/bin/smbmount //ROGUE/raid /mnt/raid/ -o guest &>/dev/null &
I started gtk2 by default
#Start GTK2
/usr/bin/start_gtk2 &> /dev/null &
I use aumix to automatically set the sound volumes to what I wanted
#Fix sound volumes
aumix -w 100 &> /dev/null &
aumix -v 100 &> /dev/null &
#Desktop Info
torsmo 2>/dev/null &
case $DESKTOP in
fluxbox )
Here I got rid of some of the default apps I didn't need:
#Get rid of pager
#fluxter &>/dev/null &
#Get rid of the dock crap
#wmswallow -geometry 70x80 docked docked.lua &
exec fluxbox 2>/dev/null
;;
jwm )
./.background
sleep 2
exec jwm 2>/dev/null
;;
* )
exec fluxbox 2>/dev/null
;;
esac
- Firefox 1.5 with jre and default installed Flash for games
- Ability to play Mp3 and other audio files with XMMS
- Ability to mount shared network drives with Samba
- Ability to play videos with Xine (on this machine at %50 size over a samba mount)
- Ability to view and edit images
- Lots of games
- Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Calculator
- Ability to add other applications easily if I need them.
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