Geeky Fun: Playing Around with Damn Small Linux
Damn Small Linux is a pretty neat-o little project. It brings together two things I love: GNU/Linux and portable apps.
Portable applications are versions of full-blown applications that can be installed on removable media (usually a USB stick) and carried with you wherever you go. I’ve been dabbling in portable apps for a while, and have become somewhat hooked on them. I have a USB stick with Windows versions of Firefox, Gaim, and Open Office on it that I carry with me. This allows me to use my favourite apps while at work on my Windows box where I am not allowed to install my own software. I’m not all that sure that we’re allowed to plug our own USB sticks into corporate machines either, but that seems to be the lesser of two evils.
Damn Small Linux (DSL) started out with the idea of slimming down a Linux distro as small as possible to allow it to run from a bootable 50MB CD. They achieved that goal, and have the smallest (I think), most usable Live Linux CD in existence. That’s nice, but given the amount of Live CDs out there these days, it’s nothing special. What is special is a version of DSL that runs within an existing Windows or Linux session. Yup, that’s right - I can plug in my stick and boot into DSL right in my Windows desktop at work. No rebooting, just click like any other program.
I was really fired up about this so-called embedded version of DSL when I found it. Using a GNU/Linux box at home and a Windows box at work can cause some cross-platform woes. In general, my OpenOffice files are fine to transfer between machines, but I’d like to be able to use cryptography and some other platform-specific technologies. The idea of running an entire distro with exactly the same apps I run at home was pretty enticing. The embedded version also appealed to me because rebooting someone’s machine to boot into my own OS seems kind of presumptuous, doesn’t it? No wonder GNU/Linux users get a bad name. If you’re in the business of walking up to your buddy’s machine and rebooting it to use your OS instead using his already booted OS, he’s going to think you’re an elitist snob. However, plugging in your stick and launching a full-blown DSL session is not only less snobby, it has an undeniable cool factor to it.
Unfortunately, that’s where the love affair ended for me. Sadly, on two of the Windows machines I tried (Win2K, 512MB Ram, 2.0 GHz processor and WinXP, 512MB Ram, 2.4GHz processor) the embedded DSL version was unable perform adequately. The DSL site says that the embedded version of DSL will run slower than the proper ‘rebootable version’, but that it should perform decently on a machine running at 1.6Ghz or better. That wasn’t my experience.
The embedded DSL’s boot time (can I call it that?) was acceptable given what was happening, but the response time during use was painfully slow. The desktop itself was responsive. Right and left clicks garnered immediate response, but launching an application was another story. Firefox took so long to launch that I actually forgot I had double-clicked it. I didn’t have any luck getting any application on the desktop to launch in under 3 minutes. I suppose that much of this is attributable to DSL running under Qemu, but I was still disappointed. I wanted what the press had promised me! Plug, click, run Linux.
Embedded DSL is a pretty neat idea, but the idea stage is where it stops. In practical use, I find that it’s easier to run Windows versions of your favourite GNU/Linux apps.
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