Today I happened to have some free time right after the September exam session. And I happened to have the need to test a light-weight Linux distribution for some old hardware i am going to setup soon.
My problem is this old hardware: in the past the only distribution booting on this kind of old x86 machines (486 boxes, 16 Megs of ram) was Debian. For some reason even Slackware still refuses to boot on these dear old computers. I chose to avoid a big distro and consider a mini-distribution.

Damn Small Linux was the answer to my problem.

Damn Small Linux is a very light-weight distribution, reduced to the bone, but it still offers almost anything one can desire to browse the web, create and edit text documents, listen to some music files, do some irc and message people. It is perfect for a small usable terminal. More, as you will read, it comes with some server-oriented packages too and is ready to become something more than a mini-distribution.
This 0.8.2 version comes in a 50 megs ISO: it fits into an usb pen. In my case i just burnt the image on a cd-rw media and booted it.

DSL project started as a model_k fork (model_k was a knoppix-based mini-distro) but soon took its own way, although it is still based on knoppix.

Knoppix has a good hardware auto-detection system and DSL is no worse...all my hardware was detected fine: there is not so much to detect on this machine, as it has no usb (so i had no possibility to test usb-pen and external hard disk), but everything was working right out of the box. A soundblaster sound card (emu10k1), the video card (an old savage) and no much more,cause, as i said, this is just a tiny terminal.

The kernel used in this version is 2.4.26 SMP, so it is eventually tuned for much more powerful machines. It comes with support for a wide choice of network cards. Wireless support is partially there: prism 2.5 cards are supported. As for the video cards there is a minimal failsafe support with the use of the Vesa-framebuffer or the simple VGA. This should work for almost every card and it seems to me a perfect choice for a mini-distribution.

Ppp support and pppoe are in the kernel, this is good news for those of you that want to use this distribution with this connection protocols. Every module needed for the setup of a small home gateway are there: a netfilter complete set of modules is loadable. It's a shame that iptables is not included among the available packages in this CD.
Good support for filesystem: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, hfs and ntfs. Pcmcia support is also there, but i had no possibility to play with it. It seems to me, considering all of this, that this mini distribution can work perfectly on laptops. That's the first impression.

As the boot completes you are taken to runlevel 5 and the Xserver startup: you have fluxbox as window manager. Many fluxbox themes are included and you can choose the one you like best. In the menu you have the possibility to choose for a complete enhanced desktop too. I go on with the minimal setup, as you can see in screenshots, it is ok for me.
I run it as a live cd, but you have two more choices in the general menu: install on hard disk and install on usb pen.

You have all you need for spare time or little works: text editors (vim and nano among them), a pdf reader, xmms for your music, gphone and naim for your communications with the world, dillo and links to surf the web (as for dillo it refused to start at 4 bit depth, I am not blaming it :) ).
A good set of tools to configure networking let you configure your connection in seconds: my network card was correctly detected and it took less than one minute configuring it with a static ip.
You can check your mail using the complete and well working sylpheed. You get some server applications too: the monkey web-server, sshd, ftpd.

The great thing is that you can enable apt and so install new software from a list of repositories: as soon as you enable it from the fluxbox menu, the software will try to connect and download the dpkg database of already installed software. And if you have enough resources you can manage the whole thing with synaptic, a gtk frontend to apt (Debianists already know it quite well).

What appears is that this distro is damn small for true!! But it is ready to be tuned and become much bigger thanks to the apt support and its synaptic interface. For now it ships with all i need and i am quite happy with that. Give it a try, at least in the live cd mode, it is worth and you could find it useful for your old hardware or for pure terminals.

Screenshots in the gallery section