Damn Small Linux - DSL

Damn Small Linux - also known as DSL - is a fully functional Desktop oriented Linux distribution which fits in a business card sized (50 MB) CD.

How to run DSL

You can run DSL from the following.

1. Bootable USB Pen Drives
2. Business Card CD (>= 50 MB)
3. Compact flash card
4. Zip drive
   
5. Installed on your Hard Disk
6. Entirely in RAM (Memory).
7. From within another operating system such as Windows through virtualization.
   

What can DSL be used for ?

DSL, even while small in size (50MB) has applications for all your computer needs. It works flawlessly on old computers with just 64 MB memory so can be installed on old machines. DSL is ideally suitable for use by people on the move to be run from USB pen drives and business card CDs. Damn Small Linux has applications for almost any task you may want to do on your computer.

DSL Screenshot

The following is a screenshot of DSL version 4.4.10.

List of Applications in DSL

DSL, despite its small size is packed with a valuable set of applications suitable for your basic computer use. A few applications worth noting are as follows :

• Firefox web browser
• Ted word processor
• Sylpheed email client
• Beaver text editor
• Siag spreadsheet
• xpdf PDF viewer 
• Monkey web server.

This is just a subset of the useful applications bundled with DSL.

Damn Small Linux - DSL Review

Read my DSL Review.

More About DSL

DSL Home Page - Click here.
Official DSL Forum - Click here.

How many Operating Systems can you name ?

The other day when I was trying out Haiku, I had a sudden brain wave. How many operating systems - old or otherwise can I really name? And how many of these have I actually used? To tell you honestly, I could name only a few including the ones I have used. Of course, I lumped all Linux distributions as one entity.

In fact, this is the list of operating systems I could name :

• DOS (MSDOS, FreeDOS, PC DOS ...)
• Linux (Fedora, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, DSL, PCLinuxOS, ....)
• Solaris (OpenSolaris, Belenix, Nexenta, ...)
• BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD,OpenBSD, PCBSD,...)
• Apple MAC OS X (Tiger, Leopard, ...)
• Microsoft Windows (Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7)
• IBM OS/2, z/OS ...
  
• Other Unix (Xenix)
• Qnx
• Haiku, BeOS

Over a period of time, I have written a couple of reviews of the ones I have used. So here is a question for you. How many operating systems can you really name? And out of those how many have you actually used (or tried out) ? Do you know of any really old operating systems apart from the ones mentioned in this list ?

Haiku - A new Operating System inspired by BeOS

Haiku is an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. It is inspired by  the now defunct BeOS and reimplements both the BeOS technologies as well as the end user experience.  Recently the Haiku team unveiled the first release candidate RC1 by releasing a liveCD of Haiku R1 Alpha1.

The Haiku R1 Alpha1 live CD ISO is only 380MB in size. Succumbing to curiosity, and because of its tiny size, I downloaded Haiku live CD and took it for a run. Simply put, I was really impressed with the user interface and the stability of the OS. I found the Haiku Desktop interface to be unique providing a radical approach to desktop computing.

Haiku live CD at present is more of a showcase and has little applications to be of any use to the lay person. However, it does bundle with it the Firefox web browser though. One thing which impressed me was the smoothness with which some of the demo OpenGL applications ran - even in a Virtual environment. Below are a few images of the Haiku operating system for your peruse.

Haiku at present works only on x86 systems and require a minimum of 128MB RAM. However, it also comes with a few handicaps namely - no wireless support yet, no package management yet, Haiku boot manager supports only a single hard disk, A few device drivers related to printing are missing ... and so on. But hey, that is why it is called Alpha. Read the full release notes to know more.

Haiku has a shell similar to the Bash shell and many of the commands are similar to the commands you use in Linux. For example, to know the version of the OS, open Haiku shell and type uname -a, Use ls command for listing directories and so on. And many open source tools have been ported to Haiku as well.

Check out the following video of the Haiku desktop to get a better feel of this promising new operating system based on BeOS.



You can download Haiku R1 Alpha1 live CD from its official website.

Assuming you have reached this far, I would like to pose a question to you. Suppose Haiku were to have more applications than Linux and if it were to meet all its goals of being a remarkable personal desktop OS, would you ditch Linux ? While answering this question, keep in mind that Haiku is as open source as Linux itself.

Google Chrome OS to officially make it's debut in 2010

Google has eventually come out with the announcement that it is developing a unique Operating System - called the Google Chrome OS.

It will be Open Source, light weight, speedy, simple and secure. Google says the new OS will be targeted at Netbooks and will make it's debut sometime next year (2010). As the name suggests, Google Chrome OS will in all probability be a browser centric OS; in that, most applications will be residing in the cloud. The OS will run on x86 and ARM architecture.

Really exciting news for sure.

[Source : Official Google Blog]