Last night I tried out "Damn Small Linux" and was pleasantly surprised at how well it performed when running on my ancient server.
As you can imagine its a very heavily stripped down version of a Debian variant. I booted it without any fuss from the CD that I burned from the downloadable iso image from the website. It booted right through to the nice GUI desktop which responded quickly to commands. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get it to go onto the internet for various reasons, I think I'd have to install it onto a USB stick or something so I've got enough writable space to install things. The iso image is 50 megs and the entire OS will run in memory if you've got 128megs or more of ram.
It did come up at some nasty resolution though but this may be something to do with shared system/graphics ram (apparently my 512kb wasn't generous enough to run 1024x768x16 ).
I'll install it on a USB stick tonight and see if I can log into VBF
If this turns out to be a good distro then I'll probably use it as the development basis for my linux robot project.
DSL really needs to be on a USB, so you can save your monitor,mouse and other settings.
There is something about booting a windows pc with a usb key into linux, logging into terminal services and running Word that is totally useless yet strangely satisfying.
).
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