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The best servers are those that don't appear to be servers at all.
Tuesday 15 July 2008, 4:48 AM
Dang, Darn, Damn Small Linux!
There are a number of ways to run DSL. The Official Damn Small Linux Book comes with a LiveCD that also has the means of burning a customized-by-the-user version onto another CD, installing it on a USB flash drive, running it in a VMPlayer window and another way of running it is in a cmd window under Windows! Needless to say its very intellectually beguiling simply because it offers an excellent way to operate small SBCs or old CPUs with Linux.
I have played with it a little bit and its amazing how fast a 600 Mhz P3 can run when its not having to drag around Windows baggage or a large Linux OS install. There are a couple of user interface issues that take a little getting used to. A right click on the desktop opens up a new menu of applications to run in place of a menu bar across one edge of the desktop. You'll get over that quickly when you see how fast the application will pop-open.
One of the means of operating DSL is as a RAM drive image. This allows for a fixed read-only operating system image that flat-out can not be written to. A second RAM “drive partition” is set to be the data storage and user profile settings record. The system image can simply be restored by re-booting the computer. For industrial applications this is the dream system setup. The user is allowed to make whatever temporary setting changes he wishes but they get wiped and replaced with the default setup on the next boot. Perfect!
Because the size is so freaking small, it should run on a relatively new SBC with 1 GB of RAM like a scalded dog!* Now all I have to do is figure a way to optimize our company's applications to operate without having to write to the read-only drive image. Yeah I know. I've got a lot of work ahead of me. Its going to be interesting to get a operating system and installed application image below 200 MBytes again.
* Please don't "rat" me out to PETA. Its only an expression!
PreviousComments on this post
I downloaded the 91 meg, live CD, and ran it. Even from the Cd the desktop was up in a very short time. Network was configured, but it doesn't setup all the hardware which would take longer, and it is a simple task to do it later. I couldn't get the 50 meg CD to boot, I may not have gotten a good download, or burn. But, at 50 meg it took less than one minute to download, the 91 meg was 1:20. I ran a server using Mandriva 9.1 for 3 years, and it was so simple to set up and maintain. Also downtime was only on a power failure. Try that with windoze server.
The manual goes through a fairly extensive description of all of the various options but I haven't tried all of them.
The bootable USB flash option works well.
I gave the damnsmalllinux.org URL to one of the programmers at work. He writes Delphi and Kelix (spelling?) and tried the CDROM boot option of the distro disk image and loved it.
I haven't tried locking access to certain IO peripherals but since standard logon is a limited user level (5 I think) you could allow only SU access to things like the USB port, floppy etc. It could make for a very secure installation, something I have to strive for with windoze xp embedded.
Thanks for pointing us at this - it looks fiendishly useful.
