Damn Small Linux: May 2010 Archives

I spent plenty of time running Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and other small live distros during my "early" days (2007-08) with free, open-source operating systems.

In the past couple of years I've settled into the routine of using "big" OSes, meaning full-fledged distros/projects installed to the hard drive in the traditional way — you know, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

I've been thinking about getting back to the small projects for some time. Today I burned a Slitaz disc. Couldn't get X to start. (And no, none of the vga=xxx boot codes would help.)

So I turned to Tiny Core Linux. I just burned images to both CD and DVD; the latter since my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop's optical drive hates all CDs now (not just CD-R but also CD-ROM) and will only recognize DVD-ROM and DVD+R (yes, I actually am using a DVD for a 10 megabyte ISO file), the former for my 11-year-old 233 MHz CPU Compaq Armada 7700dmt laptop.

I booted the Toshiba from the disc and had a working X desktop in seconds (yes, seconds). I pretty much knew my way around Damn Small Linux (it's not all that hard, to tell you the absolute truth), and while Tiny Core is different in many ways, my DSL experience did help me get started.

I quickly configured my networking interface (I needed a static IP), went to the software-installation app and added Firefox 3.6.

Yeah, I know that Firefox is hardly in keeping with a 10 MB distro, but just the fact that Tiny Core offers Firefox in more than a few guises, as well as Chromium (the open-source project on which Google Chrome is based) was something that heightened my interest in the overall project. And with a "normal" browser, I knew I could blog my experience as soon as possible (and here I am doing just that).

Curiously, the Javascript response from Firefox 3.6.x while I'm typing into this Movable Type window on my 8-year-old 1.2 GHz laptop is pretty much the same as in Ubuntu Lucid. That is a huge thing to learn: So it's not so much Lucid that's slowing things down but Firefox itself. Something to think about — that something being that bloated apps themselves can slow you down as much as anything else happening in the OS.

I love the overt minimalism of Tiny Core (which boots with almost no apps) coupled with a most unusual package manager (called the Application Browser) packed with popular applications. Everything from the aforementioned Firefox and Chromium along with plenty of text editors (including the entire OpenOffice suite) and even what looks like most of GNOME and Xfce means getting a working desktop is something that can be done very, very quickly.

I also added the Chromium browser. All of these apps are downloaded and installed in the live environment (and all in RAM, too). Tiny Core is, indeed, tiny - you add what you want.

For the "experienced" user, that's a good thing. Maybe there's some kind of script/package to add a more full desktop without picking individual apps by the dozen. That would be a great way for users of all levels to quickly get a Tiny Core system with a whole lot more functionality.

But there's a lot to be said for a system with just a Web browser. I haven't heard anybody say this, but the way I have Tiny Core running at this particular moment, I can't imagine the Google Chrome OS being much different. And if you want to boot super-quickly into a working desktop like Google Chrome OS promises, but you want to do it now with old, crappy hardware like mine, Tiny Core is ready to do it today.

I'll be looking a lot more closely at Tiny Core in the weeks ahead.