Saturday, October 06, 2007

Lightweight Operating System - Damn Small Linux [DSL]

Damn Small Linux aka DSL, is a lightweight Linux OS that can run off a flash drive or CD. The size of the OS is about 50 MB. You might think - "Hmm, this must one of those command line shell interfaces". Don't be fooled by it's size. It has a GUI desktop and several applications such as XMMS, FTP client (both graphical and command line) and server, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Dillo web browser, Links-hacked web browser, Siag Office's Siag spreadsheet, FLWriter, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), some editors (Beaver, Vim, Nano), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf, emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviewer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), Monkey web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript printer support, Network File System, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and PCMCIA support.
Whoa!! All that in just 50 megs is amazing. Wait, it gets better. You can download more software for free using DSLPanel, a tool that is available on the DSL desktop.
Get DSL here -> http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html

I can think of several scenarios where this can come in handy ->
  1. if you want to use a public PC [internet cafe, library, etc.] and want to be protected from viruses and malware, use DSL. Instructions on creating a flash drive containing DSL.
  2. PC crashes - DSL can come in handy to help you recover files from the hard disk.
  3. Put old PCs to good use by installing DSL on them

1 comment:

Ricky said...

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