Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday August 05, 2012 @12:58AM
from the sweet-zombie-tux dept. 

An anonymous reader writes "Damn Small Linux is back from the dead, with a version 4.11 RC1 release announcement at Distrowatch and another at the DSL Forums!  Quoting: 'Here is the first release candidate for Damn Small Linux (DSL) 4.11.  The changes in this release are a step toward making DSL a friendly alternative for older hardware.  I've fixed some bugs, updated some applications, and replaced others.  Applications: updated JWM to 2.1.0 (now supports rounding); updated Dillo to 3.0.2 (much improves CSS support); added XChat 1.8.9; added sic 1.1 IRC client; added XCalc-color.  Modified desktop functionality: it is now possible to switch between JWM and Fluxbox without shutting down X; added menu items to switch between DFM and xtdesk icon engines or use none at all."  Here's the download page." 

Puppy is great for running off a permanent live USB.  Although to be honest I've lost track of the development of it somewhat- last time I downloaded a new version of it I felt like I was using a completely different distro to how it was originally...

Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'd be interested to hear from a more regular user on what's changed over the years. 

debian, its got the utilities and small resource footprint you want, unlike puppy you can use apt-get anydamn thing you want, puppy is really for nerds who have too much time on their hands to fuck around with a nerd system. 

Good point.  DSL was light, but also felt very clunky: UI and to install extra software.  I wanted something with the backing of a standard package repository. 

An year or two ago, I was looking for a light Linux to run in a VM and was balancing usability with RAM usage.  Here are my numbers from some old notes.  Unless specified, the numbers are for RAM usage at login to Desktop at default config (I might have removed some apps I considered non-essential - I don't recall). 

Of course, these are not exactly scientific.  Was sshd running for Arch?,  I didn't note down.  The distro version numbers were also not noted, but all distros were roughly from 1.5 years ago.  They were more for getting ballpark estimates.  AFAI-recall, they were all booted in a 256 MB VM (Virtualbox). 

ubuntu is almost the same thing as debian, similar selection of software, same text-mode installer - which you want to be using on an old PC, giving you a text-only installation that you supplement by apt-getting a desktop or window manager. 

ubuntu mainly gives you a fresh firefox over debian ; if you're going to run firefox then the latest one will use less memory and cpu than an old version.  debian may be better if this is not a big concern and you like doing in-place upgrades every two-three years.  or you

Heck, I've run Ubuntu on machines from 2000.  Arch Linux is pretty lean and can be configured to your liking.  Arch is pretty loyal to the KISS principle too.  For distros, Arch is my favorite and they arguably have the best documentation available.  If 762MB is not too large, you could try TAILS Linux, which is a privacy-oriented distro based on (I think) Ubuntu, and is preconfigured to run all protocols through the TOR proxy.  Of course, for that reason, I'd not trust the security of it.  It's pretty cool thoug

A few years ago I aquired a ton of old HP Vectras that were all Pentium 1 machines, except for one 486 that I put DOS and Windows 3.11 on (just for fun - I had a few floppies with Windows games on them).  I've only got a couple left. 

The nice thing about them is that they still use lead-based solder, so there's no problem with tin wiskers shorting out the system after a few years.  I've got a crate of old, small hard drives, and a lot of them still work just fine (I'm talking between 1

I used that machine as a firewall for about a decade (it was already seven years old at that time).  That $250 nettop PC probably wouldn't still be running after that long.  Yeah, I upgraded and reinstalled the software a few times, but that machine served me well and like I said, I keep it as a backup firewall. 

Besides, that Vectra has a 120W power supply in it, and was cooled by the power supply fan rather than its own processor fan.  Penti

This [recycledgoods.com] is the power supply for a Vectra.  This particular one is 100W, and by the date I'd guess it was for a 486.  Most of the ones I had were 120W, manufactured in 1996, and ran Pentiums. 

Note the odd shape?  That little slanted area on the bottom of it is where the fan is.  It blew onto the processor's heat sink.  Here [recycledgoods.com] is another picture, where you can see that fan. 

Here [flickr.com] is a picture of a 486 Vectra's processor.  The Pentium models were very similar, and had no dedicated processor fan. 

But that brings up something I've been wondering for awhile which is this....at what point would it be better to toss the hardware?  I mean you can buy one of those E350 based kits for less than $150 and that thing takes less than 18w under load and idles in the mid single digits, I don't even remember what the Pi runs but its a crazy small number, so at what point does that old hardware become too much of a piggie to be worth keeping? 

Lets face it folks, while you may see the ancient P2 or P3 around occasionally most of those died ages ago thanks to the cheap caps they used back then so what I see the most of, and by most of i mean fricking insane amounts of, is those damned Pentium 4s.  Those P4s frankly were NEVER good on power and just cranked the living shit out of the heat, so would it be better to keep it, thus paying the increased electricity and cooling, or just get something cheap that doesn't blow through power like crap through a goose? 

I know that while I've got a couple of P4s waiting on me to refurb at the shop, and probably another good half dozen or more gonna be given to me free by the super for parts or refurbing, the only older machine I've kept is a 2004 Sempron a customer traded in that frankly makes a great nettop at the shop.  Its quiet, uses maybe 35w on average, and puts out hardly any heat at all.  while that Pentium d I have in the corner may run rings around it it runs rings around my AC as well. 

So at what point is it better to dump?  I hate as much as the rest to toss working gear, just about to carry a 1.8GHz P4 to the dumpster because i can't think of a damned thing to do with it and I hate tossing working machines like that, but at what point are you blowing through more in power and cooling than you'd save by keeping? 

I asked my self the same things aswell, and here's some simple math:- how much is the impact on your elec bill?- how many years does it take to break even the upfront cost of the newer but less electricity demanding hardware? 

Oh I agree, I have a couple of Athlon X2s from that period and they are just fine when it comes to power, i also hung onto that Sempron even though its even older because not only is it low power but if i want to lower the power even more i can pick up a socket 754 Athlon mobile for less than $30 that will drop right in and give me more performance while dropping the idle even lower but as long as the Sempron is doing the job i don't see the point. 

It's usually about having something that will work on other people's old hardware so whether to toss or not is somebody else's problem. I get your point though, I've got half a rack full of 32 bit machines that haven't even been turned on for a couple of years at least because just about everything newer at any speed uses less power and produces less heat. 

But that brings up something I've been wondering for awhile which is this....at what point would it be better to toss the hardware?  I mean you can buy one of those E350 based kits for less than $150

It sounds like you have applications such as networked storage or firewall boxes in mind, but for desktop use, you can can actually get quite nice used desktop hardware for less than $150 -- often less than half that.  For about 8 years now, I've been buying cheap machines, putting linux on them, and putting them in my physics lab for my students to use.  For a while I was going to garage sales, Salvation Army, and shops that sold used boxes.  But recently I've found that really nice hardware is becoming available on ebay at very reasonable prices.  Here are some examples of some recent machines I've bought:

Even with shipping, it's a lot less money than you'd pay locally for the same hardware.  It's also much less work to find it, and it's not in need of as many upgrades as the kind of stuff you find at garage sales, etc.,  where many machines have no CD drive, no ethernet, or not enough memory. 

I typically install ubuntu and set them up with xfce as the default wm.  Performance is fine. 

Dude while I appreciate you trying to help kids you might want to stay away from the P4s and Pentium Ds.  Just pick up a kill-a-watt and slap it on one of those to find out why, they belch heat and suck juice like a 70s Monte Carlo with bad rings. 

The original Core chips, pretty much all the Athlons and Phenoms were MUCH better about power and can be found just as cheaply if you look around and any of the AM2 sockets can have the chip swapped for one of the low power variants in less than 10 minutes and place

You raise an interesting point, but the numbers don't seem to bear you out.  The local cost of electricity is 19 cents per kilowatt-hour.  These machines are typically powered on for maybe 10 hours a week, which is about a 5% duty cycle.  At 50 W, the electricity cost for a year of use comes out to be about $4.  To pay back the cost of a $50 power-saving upgrade, as you suggest, would take decades, which is much longer than these things will be in use. ( My time is also worth something to me, so there's no way I

But you missed the point which is WHY pay that extra $4 when you don't have to?  As the list showed you can get Athlon X2s and first gen cores for the same price and they suck a hell of a lot less juice and don't belch out heat. 

So its not like its pay $x or pay $x+y, its pay $x for a power piggie or pay $x for a non piggie, why pay for the piggie? 

How old is your hardware?  My first computer, a 1980's era machine, IBM PS/2 Model 30, an 8086/8MHz (without heatsink or fan), had a 70W PSU, so I can safely assume that at peak load could draw this 50W.

Old hardware is only useful because it's cheap (or often free) and it's fun, if that's your thing. 

I've got a few old Sparcstation 20s that I play around with.  Why?  They're fun.  Or at least they were, before Oracle mucked about with docs.sun.com. 

I've got some old Pentium I machines that I've used as small network servers and firewalls.  As of yesterday, I'm on all modern (and much more energy efficient) machines, but a Pentium I will serve DHCP just as well as an i7.  I used to keep a few old HP Vectras a

Be sure to wipe them, and install Ubuntu or your favorite distro, so when they pick it up, take it home and fire it up, it just works.  I've had people stop back and ask what it was I left on the computer I threw out, and could I install it in their dying XP box. 

The point at which eliminating your wait time for whatever slow application (usually Firefox...), is worth the sale price of new hardware, plus the time and effort to setup that new system. 

Power is cheap, and old hardware is much lower power than people expect, due to being single-core and having low-power GPUs and North/Southbridges.  I still have a 2.4GHz P4 system up and running in an office... It draws all of 40w at idle, which means operating costs are just a few

The PI doesn't have the IO to compete with a E350.  There is no SATA, dual gigabit (or 10/100 for that mater), PCI-E, or PCI on the PI. 

I keep trying to figure out what i would do with a PI, but even as a media center it doesn't have enough hardware decode codec support and I would have to re-rip all of my dvd rips that are set up for the PS3. 

If i wanted a NAS I could go This route [willudesign.com] or similar in a stock case.  A PI as a fun nettop type toy sure, you know maybe it could save me a bunch of power when I'm just re

Also, I forgot to mention what might be obvious.  A primary consideration when looking for a clean and unbloated setup is your desktop/window manager.  Many distros could be slimmed down by using something like LXDE, XFCE, Openbox, Awesome, or even Mate.  If you don't need a digital Cirque du Soleil, you can probably avoid KDE and Gnome.  I was pretty impressed by XFCE on Arch. 
And to correct the typo in my last sentence from the other comment; I see no reason not to try DSL Linux. 

You might want to reread your history. Limitation of software to a platform is the exact reason Linux exists today. 

There are plenty of enthusiasts who want to get things working on older hardware, just for fun. If the dreams, hopes and jokes of such people offends you enough to make such harsh remarks, then maybe you should look at yourself, because a heart this cold will only bring you pain. 

yea ok whatever you want to state, heres the deal, I have linux on a 4mb 386, the lowest of the low on x86, I have it on a motorola 68030, the lowest of the low on that side of the coin.  I have used uCLinux and sorry, its a very resource heavy slow want-to-be linux like command shell, bad RTOS that really serves no other reason but to bloat system requirements, and cost, to enable piss poor performance. 

That's my project for the next few weeks.  I managed to get a stack of old Celeron machines for ten quid each.  Six of them.  So I shall learn how to set up a beowolf cluster with LinuxPMI.  If it works, I'll look into finding new processors that actually outperform an abacus.  I intend to use it for developing my interest in signal processing and compression. 

I just noticed that this distro uses JWM, which was written by legendary TI-83 programmer Joe Wingbermuehle [ticalc.org].  If you went to high school in 1998-2002 and had a TI83 or TI83+, you might have had some of his programs, such as the Ion assembly shell, Boxworld, Breakout, Diamonds, Dstar, Landmine, or Jezzball. 

Anti-X Linux, have it on a 150Mhz Pentium, DSL had some advantages like running on a 8 meg machine (with no use of X of course) and the small size, but hell its been long enough where I had to move on from DSL, and honestly its never really been a great or polished system.  Just a fuckton of basic utilitarian things crammed on a disk with a janky UI, and none of the software I would actually use. 

I don't know/why/ you'd want to run Linux on a P1, but whatever turns your crank I guess.  The misery of dropped BIOS & ethernet card support finally did me in.  Plus none of it ever works slighly as well as W98SE. 

The later Pentium chips, the MMX variants, on a decent chipset (i430VX or i430TX), were rock-solid and very usable under almost any operating system.  I still have one somewhere with Windows NT 4 Workstation (still one of the best operating systems I've ever used, especially for MJPEG video editing with a miroVideo DC30pro), Windows 98SE (for gaming), and IIRC RedHat 6.2 with IceWM.  RedHat was for the PHP/MySQL stuff I was doing at the time, plus systems programming in C, plus technically reviewing Wrox book

I'm so happy to see this project's back from the dead.  I'll once again be able to make use of super-old PC's.  I hope somebody updates the Xbox release called X-DSL someday.  It was made for modded Xboxes and it's the only distro that ever really worked well on them. 

DSL was hugely important to me.  It started me in Linux, got me understanding things, learning scripting, Perl and C. Booted all into ram it was blinding fast even on an old machine.  I love small light applications and I still love the idea of a whole desktop and browser in a 50MB iso.  It predates Puppy and all the others.  But what version stuff is it running now? 

What kernel version is it running?  libc?  Apart from the dispute between its owner and its lead developer (the latter went off to found Tinycore) the big problem with old DSL was compiling anything recent became a pain because it and the gcc versions in the repo were so out of date.  Leaving aside security issues this began to hamper what I could do with it.  Then there was the old 2.4.26 kernel. 

Is that how it has to be if the goal is to support old hardware?  How old?  Tinycore claims to support 486 with math processor and it has the latest *everything*, tc kernel and apps are often very recent. 

What is problematic with DSL and Puppy is that they are a mishmash of various programs with different toolkits.  While somewhat heavier, I prefer XFCE or LXDE based distros as they bring a more consistent experience. 

Not sure what particular compositing window manager you're running on Fedora but on Ubuntu with Unity I just do a "metacity --replace" when I need to turn compositing off.  And when I want to go back I just do "compiz --replace" as that's the wm Unity uses.  No logging out necessary.  Of course this is assuming you don't have metacity set up with the compositing but if you do just turn that off in gconf-editor. 

Glad to see it back.  I loved having DSL on a USB.  I've been using Arch for that lately, but I have trouble remembering how to get it setup after long periods without using it.  Hopefully this will also work on my old EEE PC netbook.  I'm using Arch and E there too, but never did get around to making it autosense wifi and that sort of thing.  As I recall DSL did that very well out of the box.