DSL - Damn Small Linux

[arckane]

www.damnsmalllinux.org

A 50mb distro based on being run from a credit card sized CD or a USB stick:

I tried this out yesterday for the first time, my my my, wasn't I happy I did. Included inside was the following:

XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, links web browser, FireFox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), a word-processor (FLwriter), three editors (Beaver, Vim, and Nano [Pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviewer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript printer support, NFS, Fluxbox window manager, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and pcmcia support, some wireless support.

Not bad in 50mb :D

[arckane]

I also tried this one: http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

Feather Linux. The application list is bigger, but then it fits into a 128mb stick, which I have tried and tested and it worked very very well indeed:

Abiword
Firefox
Thunderbird

Ethereal
Rox-filer
Dillo
Siag - a spreadsheet which can read Microsoft Excel files, among other formats. It is very small for its complexity and features, and is distributed under the GPL.
gaim
wavplay
mpg321 - mpg321 is a clone of the popular mpg123 command-line mp3 player
ogg123
axyFTP
cdrecord
mkisofs
rdesktop - rdesktop is an open source client for the Windows NT/2000 Terminal Server, capable of natively speaking its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's NT/2000 desktop
parted - GNU Parted is a program that allows you to create, destroy, resize, move and copy hard disk partitions. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks
partimage - Partition Image is a Linux/UNIX partition imaging utility: it saves partitions comprised of the Ext2FS (the Linux standard), ReiserFS (a new journaled and powerful file system), NTFS (Windows NT File System) or FAT16/32 (DOS & Windows file systems) file system formats to an image file.
antiword
e2undel
iftop
utelnetd - utelnetd is a tiny telnet server which is quite fast
picocom - a minimal dumb-terminal emulation program
gpart
socat
SciTE
prozilla - Multi-threaded download accelerator
gmplayer
mount.app - Dockapp for mounting and browsing devices, uses /etc/fstab
chntpw - This little program provides a way to view information and change user passwords in a Windows NT/2000 userdatabase file. Old passwords need not be known since they are overwritten.
tinycc
nano
Xpdf
hdparm
recoverdm - Another hard-disk recovery program
mtr - traceroute
betaftpd - A small FTP server which is extremely fast
Chipmunk Basic
gqcam
e3
lua - The interpreter for the LUA scripting language
ettercap
wavemon
iptables
recover - Undelete files on ext2 partitions
amap - Amap allows you to probe IP ports for running protocols, ignoring the port number. It does this by sending probe packets to the port and analyzing the responses
hping2 - hping2 is a network tool able to send custom ICMP/UDP/TCP packets and to display target replies like ping does with ICMP replies
cabextract
splitvt - run two programs in a split screen
pciutils - This package contains various utilities for inspecting and setting of devices connected to the PCI bus
LinNeighborhood - SMB Network Neighbourhood
nmap and nmapfe - a utility for port scanning large networks, although it works fine for single hosts.
aumix
VNCviewer
sqlite
SSH and SCP - secure shell and secure copy – used for file transfers and control of remote systems securely, as all transmissions are encrypted
zile
fluxbox - Windows Manager
Xpaint
Xzgv - a picture viewer which supports a large number of image file formats.
XMMS - arguably the standard audio player for Linux, and rightly so.
CTorrent - a Bittorrent client which is written in C and is the smallest I could find.

[arckane]

That's a lot of tools (Google for them if you want detailed descriptions).

Feather Linux is definitely aimed at the professional Linux guy who wants to do network security analysis. It'll certainly save me lugging around about 10 different CDs with Windows and network testing tools on it, that's for sure.

With both distributions fitting on a USB stick for booting (and can completely cache to to memory for the fastest OS you'll ever have), you may find that the PC doesn't support booting USB key based OS's. Never fear, you can download a 17kb floppy image to use together with the USB stick :) Neat, eh? :D

[bbeenn]

i tried dsl a wile ago and i liked it.
i think il download the new one and give it a go

[andys utils]

Great post, i run it and was impressed but does anyone know the command line for its backup/restore utility to backup a local hard drive?.

Also arkcane do you know where i can download the floppy image you mentioned for pcs that may not support booting from usb devices?.

[arckane]

http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/damnsmalllinux/current/bootfloppy-usb.img

You'll need either rawwrite2.exe (google for it) or dd to splat that on a disk :)

As for a way to backup and restore a hard disk image, a lot of people are turning to partimage (http://www.partimage.org/). PartImage is part of the Feather Linux version. Think of it as Ghost for Linux :)

My preferred method is using ufsdump (Solaris), also know as just dump these days on Linux (http://dump.sourceforge.net/). I don't know if dump is included, it probably is.