Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Damn Small Look

Filed under
Linux
Reviews
-s

Those Damn Small Linux folks don't sit and rest on their laurels do they? Seems I had just posted an in-depth look at version 1.1 when 1.2 came out, followed swiftly by 1.2.1, and now 1.3 yesterday. I thought before too many versions passed, I'd better take a look at my favorite itty bitty Linux os and see what was new.



There's a whole list of what's new in Damn Small Linux since our last look recorded in their changelog. Many of them are under the hood, but many are in plain view. Most noticable is the new theme, a tasteful blend of earthtones in an elephant motiff. It kinda makes one think African safari. The wallpaper makes a soothing backdrop for the new transparent aterm option. The combination proves one doesn't need megabytes and megabytes to look great. Perhaps next release they can replace the default xmms skin with one that matches their chosen theme.

Also new and notable is the wonderfully compact time and date tool. Efficient and accurate, it performs its function without a lot of fuss or muss. No reason to mess with that nasty hwclock command now, just navigate the menu to System > Set time and date.

Another great improvement is the replacement of bash burn with cdw. Its Midnight Commander look and feel might present a much more comfortable interface for those pesky cd burning tasks. It has all the options of other heavyweight gui tools without all the overhead.

This and much more are awaiting you for a mere 48 mb download. Damn Small Linux is still the same great little os I've always enjoyed, but it just keeps getting better and better. See my previous article for a more complete look at many of its great features. Download this newest release here. These and other great screenshots available in the gallery.

List of changes since our last look:

Lots of changes for 1.3!
1. Created an Icon layout manager for xtdesk.
2. Improved icon and menu persistence with extensions.
3. Created a GUI date/time tool. System>Set Date Time
4. Created a frugal grub install script.
5. Replaced rxvt with aterm and added transparency xshell options.
6. Updated naim.
7. Replaced Bash Burn with cdw.
8. Changed filetool.lst, xfiletool.lst, and webdata.lst to be hidden.
9. Reduced iso by stripping libraries of debug symbols
10. Many typo's have been fixed
11. Fixed 2button mouse bug
12. Adding users capability is now defaulted
13. Fixed xvesa "leftovers" bug when choosing lower resolutions
14. Fixed eth0 disable upon use of pon
15. Fixed the null menu bug upon loading certain menuless extensions
16. Deprecated the "ci" extension type
17. Added persistence to embedded user.tar.gz for uci types
18. Internet man page lookup bug fixed
19. New default theme
20. Fixed permissions in dsl-embedded for Linus files
21. Fixed reset noload flag for hard drive installed root mydsl-loading

......

Changes for DSL 1.2.1:
1. Restored GNU tar command
2. Updated xzgv with security patch
3. Corrected boot logo screen

......

Changes for DSL 1.2:
-- New .dslrc to save local mirror and protocol.
-- New GUI Mirror selector for .dslrc, Apps->Tools->Mirror Selector
-- Enhanced mydsl boot time option to accept a directory
-- Enhanced backup/restore now defaults to /home/dsl and
-- with xfiletool.lst to specify files and dirs to exclude from backup
-- Enhanced ndiswrapper,prism2, iwconfig GUI's for public access points
-- Enhanced mydsl to prevent non-DSL user corruption
-- Enhanced frugal and pendrive scripts to allow updates
-- Updated monkey webserver to 0.9.1
-- Updated busybox to 1.0
-- New boot logo screen.
-- New default theme, Tree_and_Moon

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.