Damn small linux

Linux goes from small to tiny

Having delivered a surfeit of joy with our two-week Linux spin, we have only one choice: EML (Even More Linux).

Last week we were talking about Damn Small Linux, but before we continue on with that we need to mention a few other items. First, you will remember from two weeks ago that the standard configuration of coLinux features a Debian distribution. This is all well and good but may not be everyone's cup of Un*x.Should you have a raging desire to run another distribution, you will need to create a root image of your target system.

Creating a root image is reasonably complicated and arcane enough - see www.nwfusion.com, DocFinder: 5632 - that we will leave it as an exercise for the ambitious reader. If you do create a runnable root image please let us know, give us access to a copy and we will make it available to other readers and send you an official Gearhead something or other.

Another issue that came up with coLinux was raised by reader Steve Sullam: "I got as far as being able to ping addresses on the Internet using the tap connection with the Debian image, but somehow it won't resolve names to addresses on the Internet. I have tried editing the resolv.conf file, adding some good name servers and putting bind in front of hosts in host.conf. Maybe you have some ideas."

Steve, it turns out the heart of the problem is when the TAP driver under Windows coLinux is routing packets to and from the host driver. Because it cannot read the host's TCP/IP configuration, the IP configuration data for the hosted Linux system is incomplete.

You can define this data statically or reconfigure the coLinux distro to use network address translation or a bridged connection. This is, unfortunately yet another topic fraught with strange technical gyrations that would take too long to explain here. Check out the details at DocFinders: 5633 and 5634 for the gruesome truth.

DSL

Anyway back to Damn Small Linux. As we noted, it is a stripped-down version of Knoppix, which is itself already a stripped-down version of Linux.

First, let us explain one of the finer points of Damn Small Linux: DSL is small. When we say small we don't mean just that it can fit on a CD, we mean you can fit 12 copies on a single CD.Yep, Damn Small Linux is really really small - as the DSL home page claims: "50 megabytes of penguin power." And because it requires no host kernel patches or drivers to run, QEMU (a freeware processor emulator - (details at DocFinder: 5635) is safe and easy to use.

Being so small also means you can boot DSL from a USB pen drive. In fact the DSL site, www.damnsmalllinux.org, offers DSL pre-installed on a bootable 128M-byte USB 2.0 pen drive for a measly $47 with all earnings going into funding DSL development.

The DSL site describes the system thusly: "Damn Small Linux has a nearly complete desktop, including XMMS (MP3, and MPEG); FTP client; Dillo Web browser; links-hacked Web browser; spreadsheet; Sylpheed e-mail; spellcheck (U.S. English); a word processor (Ted-GTK), four editors (SciTe, nVi, Zile [eMac clone] and Nano [Pico clone]); graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint and xzgv); Xpd; emelFM (file manager); Nairn (AIM, ICQ, IRC); VNCviwer; Rdesktop; SSH/SCP server and client; DHCP client; PPP; PPPoE (ADSL); a Web server; calculator; generic and GhostScript printer support; NFS; Fluxbox window manager; games; system monitoring apps; a host of command-line tools; USB support; [PCMCIA support; and some wireless support]."

This is a really amazing distribution and, as we noted, rather than having DSL take over the whole machine and then the PC requiring a reboot to get back to Windows, there is a version called "Embedded DSL" that can run alongside Windows in much the same way that coLinux can. The only drawback with Embedded DSL is that performance is much slower - slower even than coLinux. To get even barely good performance your PC will have to be running at better than 1GHz.

Embedded DSL requires QEMU. To support the Embedded DSL version, QEMU runs in "full system emulation" mode. This lets QEMU emulate a full PC, including a processor and various peripherals. Under this environment, you can launch different operating systems alongside Windows.

We're interested in running DSL under QEMU and that's what we'll investigate next week.