Mark Stosberg

Damn Small Linux: A Linux rescue disk and workstation

by Mark Stosberg

I just want to give a plug for Damn Small Linux. Like the larger Knoppix that it's based on, Damn Small Linux is a "live" Linux CD. It's niche? It's only 50 Megs, and can be bought for about $7 as a business-card size CD.

Like Knoppix, hardware is auto-detected as it boots, giving you a complete desktop environment in just a few minutes, without ever touching the hard drive.

To fit a full suite of applications in 50 Megs, applications are selectively chosen, and slimmed-down alternatives are used.

The result is a product that performs well on small systems.

My own test

I tried out Damn Small Linux 0.4.8 on a old machine with the following specs:

Due to the slow CD drive, applications were a bit a slow to launch, but otherwise performance was impressive, considering there was no possibility of virtual memory, and the RAM was serving double duty as the hard-drive as well. Still, I could boot into X and run several applications at a time.

When I was setting up on old laptop with Linux, I found my old DamnSmall-empowered box made a great "floppy burner". Using the friendly links web browser, I downloaded many floppy boot disk images to the RAM-disk and then used the "dd" utility to copy them onto floppy disks. The tools to create, format, and mount filesystems came in handy as well.

Sometimes performance was even better than I expected because the ramdisk has a much faster access time than a hard drive does.

Other Possibilities

On a more capable system Damn Small Linux has even more possibilities. It has a one-click option to download and start using Mozilla Firebird. Also, the entire disk can be loaded into RAM, freeing the CD drive to play audio CDs or load other data disks. (Boot with knoppix toram to do that.)

If you can actually have a hard-drive, you can even install the Debian-based system easily from the CD.

Conclusion

Any place you might carry a Linux rescue floppy, I would consider adding a Damn Small Linux CD to your kit. It's physically smaller, while being faster and offering many more features.

It also makes a great demo for how Linux can perform on older systems.

Mark Stosberg