DSL 4.4 was just released on June 9th, so this past weekend I installed it on my Compaq Deskpro Pentium III 800 Mhz machine. It only has 256 megs of RAM, so a lightweight distribution like DSL is a good choice for it. Their site claims you can run DSL 486 DX with 16 megs of RAM, so even this old Compaq should fly with what it’s got. A link to the release notes is here.

DSL is an incredibly small distribution, hence the name. According to their site it started as an experiement to see how many useful applications they could fit on a 50 megabyte live CD. Even though DSL is a live CD, you still have option of installing to a hard drive or a USB pen drive. They even have an installation that lets you run DSL using QEMU on a Windows host machine. I chose to install DSL to my hard drive using the frugal install. This creates a Grub menu for you and puts the compressed DSL CD image onto your hard drive. I found it cut the boot time to about 1/3 what is was with the CD.

There are a couple of things done differently in DSL than say, an Ubuntu or OpenSUSE, to get the under 50 megabyte size. For instance, you are using an older 2.4.31 Linux kernel and Gtk1 applications. An older kernel and Gtk1 apps use less system resources than a newer kernal and Gtk2 apps do . If you need a 2.6 kernel and Gtk2 apps they have a spin off of DSL called DSL-N that might be a better choice.

For the window manager, there is no Gnome or KDE here