Damn Small Linux 4.3 -- quick first impressions

It took me a few tries to get a good burn on Damn Small Linux 4.3.

Once I did, it worked great on my Dell Optiplex GX 520. It also performed flawlessly on my VIA C3 test box. It didn't do so well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where the colors were totally whacked out (blue looked like orange, etc. ...). But DSL has never run well on the Gateway, so I didn't expect anything.

The biggest "get" in DSL 4.3 is Firefox 2, which for some reason has been renamed Bon Echo for the purposes of this distribution.

Going from Firefox version 1.06 to 2 is a huge deal. Quite a few Web sites require at least FF 1.5 to work at all, including many Web e-mail services and the Movable Type and Blogger interfaces.

And on my 64 MB Compaq laptop, Damn Small Linux is pretty much the only thing that'll run Firefox without continuous swapping and long delays between operations. So having FF 2 is very important to me.

DSL 4.3 did load and run on the Compaq, but for some reason the desktop wallpaper did not appear. I've been running DSL 4.0 on the Compaq, and that does X perfectly, along with the desktop design. I don't know what's wrong with the 4.3 configuration, but it does make the screen look rather gray, also the machine status information unreadable on the upper right side of the screen.

And when I ran Fluxbox instead of JWM, I couldn't figure out how to get the Fluxbox menu to show up. Right-clicking brought up the DFM file manager (which I quite like while using JWM; it made DSL 4.0 a lot easier to use).

If I can manage to bump up the RAM on my Compaq laptop (aka The $15 Laptop) to the maximum of 144 MB, I might be able to comfortably run Firefox/IceWeasel in OpenBSD or Debian. Right now, I can't even run Seamonkey (the Mozilla-based Web suite) in Puppy Linux. Basically I can run the Dillo browser in any OS, but that doesn't allow me to do all the things I need to do on the Web. Only DSL allows me to run Firefox with some measure of comfort in my small amount of RAM.

Aside from the Firefox upgrade, I don't see a lot of major differences in Damn Small Linux, and that's as it should be. DSL has a fairly rapid development pace, and lead developer Robert Shingledecker puts a lot into fixing bugs from release to release.

Even without resolving the desktop-wallpaper issue, DSL 4.3 is a huge leap for any user with only 64 MB of RAM. Fixing this little problem will cement Damn Small Linux as the best distribution for my Compaq Armada 7770dmt.