
DSLR – Damn Small Linux Remake - networked
http://dslr.dimakrasner.com/
======
mhd
The small Linux distributions are an interesting alternate universe. Very
hobbyist in some respects, as often it's mostly repackaging standard distro
stuff, getting older software to compile, writing simple GUI scripts -- not
exactly developing a semi-embedded Linux subset with state of the art tools.
Very hackish. And I mean that in a good way…

~~~
Alupis
If you do the Linux From Scratch book and follow the embedded track, you
should wind up with a busybox based distro around 33MB's on disk, plus you
will learn a LOT about how a distro does what it does. I highly recommend it.

------
mcintyre1994
Nice, I remember being shown DSL and being amazed someone could make an OS
that small.

> DSLR's approach to security is different . It is possible to run as root
> without causing a global disaster.

Is there any more information available on how this is achieved?

~~~
Zardoz84
uLinux or picoLinux (I don't remember very well the name) -> Runs on one or
two 3.5 floppies. There is a version with 3 or 4 floppies with an X-Windows
included.

~~~
dave1010uk
I remember running a QNX demo off a single floppy on a 66MHz 486. Included a
web browser, a game ,and an editor, all in 1.44MB

[http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html)

~~~
barrkel
I remember that too. Very impressive, it was.

------
guard-of-terra
Dillo is so awesome! I urge you to apt-get install dillo

The forgotten feeling when computers responded _immediately_.

I guess I'll be using it for some web.

~~~
_pmf_
Dillo also has an easy, approachable plugin architecture:
[http://www.dillo.org/dpi1.html](http://www.dillo.org/dpi1.html)

This makes me feed sorry for the people dealing with the XUI/JS/CSS cesspit of
Firefox plugins.

~~~
k__
Do they plan to add a JavaScript engine?

~~~
angersock
Why would you ruin a perfectly good browser with JS support? :|

~~~
krapp
Probably because most users would prefer that the sites they visit actually
work.

Supporting other embedded languages might be nice, but of course, unless all
the major browsers also support the same, sites would have to provide an
alternative in javascript for everybody else.

Not supporting javascript at all when it's integrated so deeply into the web,
when you will doubtless be able to simply turn it off if you want, seems
unreasonable.

For better or worse, the web is becoming a platform for distributing
javascript binaries which execute in the browser. Unlike most other platforms,
however, at least you can turn it off or view the source or block parts of it
if you like.

~~~
barsonme
Every site should be able to function normally without JS. Granted that
doesn't necessarily hold true for web apps, but for regular sites they
shouldn't lose functionality because somebody has JS disabled (or doesn't have
it at all!)

~~~
krapp
I agree with you. I have js disabled by default and every time I run up
against a site that uses client-side templating I find it incredibly annoying
- I understand the rationale behind it but it's still annoying how many things
tend to break without javascript.

However, you can't design a browser around an expectation of what the web
_should_ be like.

And anyway, it could be worse. If there were no javascript we would all be
complaining about the dominance of VBScript in the browser.

~~~
barsonme
> VBScript

 _shudder_

JS itself isn't bad, it's the misuse which is bad. Subtle JS use should add
_extra_ functionality, not _be_ the functionality.

It's funny, I was just having a conversation about JS in freenode #python the
other day and we were complaining/discussing the same thing.

The worst is when my browser freezes because of some JS that's too over the
top.

------
walterbell
No policy statement on systemd? :)

[http://alpinelinux.org/](http://alpinelinux.org/) is another minimal
appliance distro.

~~~
justincormack
Yes Alpine is a nice distro that also uses Musl. Good way to try out Musl libc
if you haven't yet.

------
userbinator
The name would fit perfectly for a distro used on the embedded system in a
digital camera. :-)

~~~
mykhal
ADF (acronym design failure)

------
peterwwillis
If you're a developer who doesn't know very well how Linux distributions (or
operating systems in general) work, you should spend a weekend or two playing
around with an embedded Linux distro like this. Unfortunately DSLR's build
environment does not seem like the easiest to understand for first-timers.

For example, instead of Makefiles per package, there's a package-specific
shell script which incorporates some magic from scripts/build_package and is
then sourced by the same to add some functions, with references to patches in
a separate directory, and build dependencies tracked by a Makefile.deps file
that's included by the root Makefile before the build_package script is run,
which incidentally has tons of package-specific logic built in. You'd be re-
reading 10 files over and over any time you build or troubleshoot a package.

All of this inside of a chroot using a bootstrapped cross compiler, which lord
knows most people have never dealt with before. And the dependencies for
building the cross-compiler aren't built from source, meaning this isn't a
fully bootstrapped build environment, to say nothing of tracking versions. The
resulting packages will vary from system to system, and it will be more
difficult to port to non-x86.

~~~
walterbell
What do you think of
[https://www.yoctoproject.org/](https://www.yoctoproject.org/) as an
alternative?

~~~
peterwwillis
Yocto seems to be an attempt to make a standards body for embedded Linux
development. It's neat and probably a huge boon for corporate-sponsored
development, but overkill for the casual developer to learn more about Linux.
All you need is a HOWTO to step you through building a toolchain and setting
up the files needed to boot up with some programs running at start time, which
LFS provides.

Here's a guide for 'old' Linux distros
[http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/](http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/)
and here's a guide using systemd
[http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-
systemd/](http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/)

------
bonyt
When I was in high school I had a 16mb flash drive, so I made a tiny Linux
distro for it! It had X11 with blackbox, a web browser (dillo), a mail client
(sylpheed), an IM client (ayttm), a VNC client, a music player (xmms), a
terminal (rxvt), busybox with a lot of options set, and ssh (dropbear).

I just found the image of that flash drive, if anyone is interested. Keep in
mind it is unchanged from its original form in 2006 :)

Image:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/8lomxad7cqjn10w/nanolinux.img?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/8lomxad7cqjn10w/nanolinux.img?dl=0)

Virtualbox Image (identical, converted with qemu-img):
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/uo1huoawjkkqmj7/nanolinux.vdi?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/uo1huoawjkkqmj7/nanolinux.vdi?dl=0)

Screenshot:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/v7ijnd6b6688brz/Screenshot%202014-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/v7ijnd6b6688brz/Screenshot%202014-09-09%2016.02.15.png?dl=0)

------
eCa
They have an uphill battle, SEO-wise.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dslr](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dslr)

~~~
Mahn
Why would they even care for SEO? It's not like it's a commercial project.

~~~
maaaats
Why wouldn't they care just because it's not commercial?

~~~
recursive
Because their ability to work on this project does not depend on its
accessibility from a search engine.

------
tomswartz07
I greatly appreciate the fact that one of the tenents of the project is
documentation.

More often than not, the vast majority of these awesome little projects
flounder under the lack of documentation.

Making it available (and well done) allows for anyone to just jump in and
help.

Kudos!

~~~
zem
"tenets" (because you're likely pronouncing it wrong too)

------
sarciszewski
[http://www.gonullyourself.org/ezines/ZF0/zf0%202.txt](http://www.gonullyourself.org/ezines/ZF0/zf0%202.txt)

I wonder if we'll see a ZF02 remake for DSL? :]

------
yeukhon
Back in 2008 when I was in high school I picked up computers that were thrown
out by the school with 256 or less RAM. The smallest one only had 64mb of RAM!
I managed to install Ubuntu 6 on it but I could feel the lag. I found DSL and
I had no trouble running it on them at all. The iSO was only 50MB irrc. It was
damn small.

This was me: [http://damnsmalllinux.org/static/act-
Print/f-1/t-19848.html](http://damnsmalllinux.org/static/act-
Print/f-1/t-19848.html)

~~~
Zardoz84
I keep a copy of SuSE Linux from 1998. It have six CD-roms (in a time were
Internet by dial-up was not cheap here), but I remember that I managed to
install it on 200-300 MiB with a machine with less of 256 MiB of ram, and It
could run GNOME 1.0 over KDE !!!! And it was running pretty soft.

------
giis
This remains me about my own LFS/busybox based stuff
[http://freecode.com/projects/minili](http://freecode.com/projects/minili)
"minili - miniMAL liNUX 3.8 MB size. You can download and burn it to CD/DVD or
Try with virtual machines.If everything is fine,all you can do is, to login to
this linux and run few basic commands."

------
ja27
It was maybe about 5 years ago that I was still running DSL on a old Dell
Pentium II laptop on the side of my desk. It made a decent ssh / x3270
terminal and acted as a digital photo frame most of the day. But it could do
some light web browsing and stuff in a pinch. Booted from a mini CDR and used
a 32 meg USB thumbdrive as storage.

------
codygman
Does this come with tinyxserver by default? Anyone know how to start it?
startx doesn't seem to work.

------
thomasjudge
Are there any mirrors? The site is getting hn-dotted. It should not take 8hrs
to download a 108M file

~~~
cFire
[http://coolfire.insomnia247.nl/DSLR/](http://coolfire.insomnia247.nl/DSLR/)

The md5sums for 3 of them don't seem to match what's on the DSLR page though.
The one with a .md5sum file does match. Use others with caution for now.

~~~
cFire
Turns out the ones with incorrect md5sums are indeed older builds. All ISOs
are being brought up to date as fast as it'll go.

------
silveira
For the ones having problem with slow speeds to download the iso, try here
[https://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux_DSLR_Linux](https://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux_DSLR_Linux)

~~~
cFire
There's current mirrors added on the site. The isos from archive.org are
outdated.

------
Newky
My first linux that I managed to run on a vm. I only had access to dial up
internet and thus could only download a very small package. The screenshots
make me very nostalgic indeed.

------
codehero
How does the power efficiency of DSLR compare to Ubuntu? Would I get longer
battery life?

~~~
mhd
I somehow doubt it. Sure, there's a lot less stuff running, so there are fewer
wakeups. But on the other hand, it's missing some essential power-saving
software like `acpid` that tells bits of hardware to take a rest in the first
place.

~~~
Wicher
> [...] like `acpid` that tells bits of hardware to take a rest

I believe that that stuff is mostly in the kernel. Man acpid:

> acpid is designed to notify user-space programs of ACPI events.

~~~
mhd
acpid being only one of the tools usually there to interface with power
management, I'm not really up-to-date what Ubuntu uses nowadays. And yes, as
with a lot of hardware stuff you're going to end up in the kernel in the end,
but without _any_ management/supervision software (never mind drivers), you
usually won't get a quiet and cool laptop. Try starting a barebones arch
installation on one these days, without acpid, tlp etc.…

------
terminado
Digital Single Lens Reflex?

------
crapiola
"...comes pre-loaded with many useful applications and breaths* new life
into..."

*Grammar Nazi alert - breathes

~~~
gpvos
There are a few other mistakes (okay, at least one; I'm not enough of a
grammar nazi to have counted them).

------
smegel
Sounds like a fun project.

------
lmedinas
I cannot even think of how many security vulnerabilities exists in these
applications used for this "remake".

~~~
Eiriksmal
To quote the DSLR's author _Very often, new versions of applications are
heavier than older ones (Wirth 's Law). If the old version already solves the
problem ... without any compromise in security or stability, why make the
switch [to a bloated new version]?_

~~~
cwyers
The author SAYS that, but that's ALL he says. There's nothing to back up the
claim that the older versions are not a compromise in security. Are all known
vulnerabilities patched? Are security fixes backported?

~~~
wangling2
Almost never: which may causes issues likes thoses! : From Wikipedia &
OpenBSD: The affected versions of OpenSSL are OpenSSL 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f
(inclusive). Later versions (1.0.1g and ulterior ) and previous versions
(1.0.0 branch and older) are not vulnerable. Installations of the affected
versions are vulnerable unless OpenSSL was compiled with
-DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS.

same applies for :
[http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurity...](http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-
sa-19990414-ios-nat-acl)

same applies for : [https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2010/03/18/update-on-
secun...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2010/03/18/update-on-secunia-
advisory-sa38608/)

same applies for :
[http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001013](http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001013)

same applies for :
[https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01015/0](https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01015/0)

sticking to early versions (lazingly will save you)

