Cool distro of the day: Damn Small Solaris (yes, I said Solaris)

OK, never mind the huge controversy going on about OpenSolaris. OK, I grant that the project is in turmoil, and Debian founder-turned-Sun evangelist Ian Murdock’s silence isn’t helping the matter. But I digress. I just found out about an intriguing new project out of Russia — Damn Small Solaris. Yes, it takes the Damn Small Linux concept (which is also spreading to another nascent distro, Damn Small BSD) and uses OpenSolaris as the base for a 60 MB live CD. I can’t wait to burn one and try it. Oh, I used the English page for the link above; here’s the Russian page for those who can read it.

Again, thanks go to Ladislav and his crew at Distrowatch, where I find out just about everything.

Heard at SCALE 6x: Damn Small Linux moving to Firefox 2

Damn Small Linux won’t add just any application to its 50 MB distribution. But when there’s a big hue and cry, things that users really need tend to get added. I thanked Robert Shingledecker for adding my favorite lightweight image editor, MtPaint, to DSL, and I’m anxiously awaiting another improvement:

Firefox in DSL will move from the current version 1 to the GTK 1 version of Firefox 2. That’s a big deal because a lot of Web sites require at least Firefox 1.5 for full functionality. It means, for one thing that it’ll be possible to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets with Damn Small Linux.

Robert has two machines running DSL at the booth. One was that really, really small Sony laptop, on which DSL looked great. The other was one of those great little Damn Small Machine fanless Mini-ITX PC’s that are sold at the DSL Store. It had no hard drive. DSL booted off of a USB key, which was then pulled out of its jack.

I really, really want one of these little computers. I’m a huge fan of Mini-ITX and fanless machines in general. They save space as well as energy, and I really enjoy the quiet.

As far as the 3 series of Damn Small Linux, Robert is keeping its development going for at least the near future because it’s the version that the Damn Small Linux book is based on.

As far as competition among the smaller-footprint distros go, Robert said there’s no bad blood between DSL and Puppy Linux. “We’re doing our own thing — there’s no rivalry,” he said.

I mentioned the nascent Damn Small BSD project to Robert, and all he would say was that DSL’s John Andrews was looking into the situation. I took that to mean they’re not ecstatic about another project appropriating the “Damn Small” name.

BSD update

In the past week, I’ve downloaded, burned and tried out a new version of DesktopBSD, and I also received a comment from Gerard van Essen, creator of the great FreeBSD — The Unknown Giant blog to tell me about its new URL. Sources of news for the BSD distros are few and far between, and I’m grateful to Gerard for all his work in this area.

For those who don’t know, DesktopBSD is an easier-to-use spin on FreeBSD — the latter being by far the most popular of the BSD offshoots (the other big ones being NetBSD and OpenBSD, the latter for which I also have a whole lot of admiration). All of the three main BSD distros are pretty much focused on servers. They install with minimal apps, and it’s up to you, the user, to add what you want. And they all use ports to add packages. My understanding of how ports work is rudimentary at best, but there’s a lot of software available that way, and I believe you compile everything for your specific CPU.

DesktopBSD and PC-BSD (the latter also based on FreeBSD) are two attempts — somewhat successful, I think — in bringing BSD to the desktop. I’ve installed both and used them minimally, but since I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get ACPI power management to control my noisy laptop CPU fan, I haven’t really stuck with them. The only BSD that will install to my desktop text box (based on a somewhat rare VIA C3 Samuel processor) is OpenBSD, and while I liked what I saw, I didn’t know enough to really take it where I needed it to be. I probably need that PDF book from O’Reilly to get me further down the road with OpenBSD (there’s one by the same author on FreeBSD, too).

I did see this new FreeBSD book from No Starch Press, and I highly recommend it. It didn’t really address desktop implementation, and I hope somebody else takes up that cause and writes a great book on the subject. The book’s author, Michael W. Lucas, is very good with the technology as well as an excellent writer. If I was more serious about FreeBSD on the server, I’d probably spring for the book. No Starch has another book on FreeBSD server implementation coming out soon, and that might also be worth a look.

Anyhow … what’s great about the new DesktopBSD is that it not only will install the OS, it also functions as a live CD so you can see how your hardware reacts to the system.

Mine doesn’t react so well. I did get the proper resolution in X, but just as in PC-BSD, there’s this funny little unintelligible graphic box hanging off my mouse pointer, and I also had trouble getting my static IP to work (I’ve done it before in DesktopBSD but just couldn’t get it done this time). If I can’t get networking to flow at my office (where I have the static IP), I can’t really get too far. When I did the full install of DesktopBSD a while back, networking did work, so it’s something in the live CD environment that’s keeping it from working.

Again, I’d consider running OpenBSD and building up my own desktop, but it just looks too damn hard. This great blog shows one man’s path to using OpenBSD on the desktop, and I’m just nowhere near that smart. This guy Denny White is an absolute genius. I am truly not worthy. This stuff makes Slackware look like child’s play.

A project I’m looking forward to is Damn Small BSD — taking the Damn Small Linux philosophy and applying it to BSD. It’s not ready to use yet, but I’m keeping an eye on it.

Overall, I’d love for BSD to be as good on the desktop as Linux. For servers, the general opinion is that a machine running BSD (usually specially compiled for the CPU) will be faster than most precompiled Linux installations. But it’s harder to build and maintain. But on the desktop, the BSDs — and the distros based on them — are way behind Linux. It makes you appreciate all the work that developers put into distros like Debian, Slackware, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Puppy, Damn Small Linux and the like.

I’d love for the people behind the BSDs to devote more attention to the desktop. DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are doing a lot, but I’d like to see something that compels users to try out and stick with a BSD distro.

Update: I was looking at the blogroll on Denny’s Blog, and I saw a link to OliveBSD — a live CD based on OpenBSD. I’m downloading it now, and as soon as I get some blanks (my stack of 100 CD-Rs being totally spent), I’ll boot it up and see how it works. Activity on the distro seems to have stopped in 2006 …

Quetzal is an OpenBSD-based live DVD (thanks again, Denny!). I don’t have DVD-burning capability right now, but I’d love to try it.

And yet another derivation of FreeBSD on Denny‘s page that I hadn’t heard about: MidnightBSD, derived from FreeBSD. It’s contained on two discs. And there’s supposedly a live CD image, but I couldn’t find it.

This week’s Distrowatch Weekly is PACKED with news

There are quite a few good Web sites for free-software users, but when it comes to sheer volume and organization, Distrowatch tops them all. I don’t know how Ladislav Bodner does it. He tracks many hundred Linux and BSD distributions, plus the applications that go into them. I hope he’s making a mint, because otherwise there’s little to no justice in the world.

Anyhow, the latest edition of Distrowatch Weekly is bigger than usual — there’s a lot going on in the Linux and BSD world.

I plan to blog individually about a half-dozen or more of Ladislav’s news items, but in the interest of remembering what they were, here’s what caught my eye:

Darkstar Linux is an easy-to-use variation on Slackware

PCLinuxOS releases a “MiniMe” live CD with minimalist KDE desktop

PCLinuxOS announces $150 computer with PCLinuxOS installed

A new distro, Damn Small BSD, promises a 50 MB live CD based on FreeBSD. Few other projects have me as excited as this one, especially now that so many other BSD distros are going DVD only.

There’s way more news than this. Keeping up with Distrowatch is one way to stay on top of it. (And don’t forget LXer, where links to everything open-source are updated many times a day.