DSL remake

[curaga]

http://dslr.dimakrasner.com/

DSLR is a small, "live" Linux-libre distribution in the spirit of Damn Small Linux, targeted at advanced users. It's a lightweight operating system for i686 and x86_64, which comes pre-loaded with many useful applications and breathes new life into nostalgic applications and old hardware.

Seems to be entirely new people. An interesting mix of gtk1/64-bit/musl/static.

[Lee]

Interesting development.  Thanks for the tip.

In the  comparison with Tiny Core, they mention using GTK+ instead of FLTK, toybox instead of BusyBox and musl instead of uClibc.  I'm not familiar with those alternatives but I wonder what might be the implication of each of those choices?  Is it just a matter of size vs features?

I'll have to fire it up in a vm this weekend... but I somehow doubt I'll be adopting it as a day-to-day replacement for Core.   

[gerald_clark]

Well, you will have to download it first, and the download speed is horribly slow, about 300K/minute.

[bmarkus]

There is a comparison to TC on their WEB saying TC is using  uClibc which is wrong.

[curaga]

Yes, I posted to their irc about uclibc earlier today.

@Lee

Gtk1 has long been dead, while fltk is actively maintained (for some values of actively ). Toybox is mainly a license alternative by people who didn't like Busybox being GPL; I believe it has less features still.

[bmarkus]

From Wikipedia, Toybox vs. Busybox:

"Toybox focuses on standards more than on compatibility with its GNU counterparts."

whatever it means.

[gerald_clark]

Whose standards?

[gerald_clark]

It took 5 hours to download.
It doesn't run under virtualbox.  X doesn't start.
It doesn't run on my Dell Laptop.
It runs on my T5730, but:
It is ugly.
It does not do dhcp configure of network card.
It has a wireless config utility but no wired config utility.
Setting up the wired network was a joy ( not ) because THERE IS NO PING!
The package manager offers 10 new packages.
The display installed packages displays them in some random order.
I can't find any installer program.
I see no persistence of any kind.  It appears to be a live CD only, so why the package manager?
Mount gives no output as to failure/success of a mount.
I could not format and mount a partition on my thumb drive.

[nick65go]

Hi core team!

Please do no confuse a bad implementation of a good idea with a general failure.
I regularly visit http://www.landley.net/toybox/about.html

The wiki is old and focused on wrong politics goals, not on merits. Unfortunate even the toybox web site is not updated.
Rob is a lonely wolf, tinycore has some 8 developers. Do you remember him as the biggest contributor in history to busybox? He use the same atomic tools like core team here: ash, sed, grep, awk... How about his kernel tempfs patch idea  to boot in RAM? Or patch the kernel sources to do NOT need perl to compile the kernel?
I consider him at the same level to tinycore fondator Robert Shingledecker.

I am very interested in toybox and aboriginal linux. The MAIN goal is a development environment for ARM to replace android. To rebuild itself on ANY architecture (ARM included) by using Qemu and just few tools like kernel + toybox + muslib + gcc.

The main development is in git. The similarity with Tinycore is amazing. The focus in toybox/aboriginal is on base kernel+tools, versus Tinycore which is focused (mainly but not only) in tcz extensions (even those are not scripted like in archlinux AUR, most are user contributed).
sample:  toybox-x86_64    07-Jul-2014 05:13  285K , versus 500-800K busybox?

[curaga]

Oh, I didn't mean anything bad about Rob; he's a very capable developer. I just find nothing wrong with GPL.

[isr]

It took 5 hours to download.
It doesn't run under virtualbox.  X doesn't start.
It doesn't run on my Dell Laptop.
It runs on my T5730, but:
It is ugly.
It does not do dhcp configure of network card.
It has a wireless config utility but no wired config utility.
Setting up the wired network was a joy ( not ) because THERE IS NO PING!
The package manager offers 10 new packages.
The display installed packages displays them in some random order.
I can't find any installer program.
I see no persistence of any kind.  It appears to be a live CD only, so why the package manager?
Mount gives no output as to failure/success of a mount.
I could not format and mount a partition on my thumb drive.

Its very much a work-in-progress right now, looking at the git repo and the large thread on the puppylinux forum where his ongoing work was being discussed and tested. IMHO, its interesting in that he's tried from the ground up to incorporate all of his efforts into a single scripted entity, so the entire "distro" can be rebuilt from scratch with ease.

Philosophy-wise, it does share sympathies with TinyCore, in that his "distro" is really intended as a lightweight (musl vs glibc, gtk1 vs gtk3, etc), easy-to-deploy (everything is statically linked) base.

Must admit, I haven't run it yet - just been browsing through his git repo looking at the build and packaging scripts (and some of his patches to upstream pkgs).

[Lee]

I tried it in a qemu vm.  It came up to a console, logged in as root, but didn't seem to even try to start X.  I explored a bit, found I couldn't mount anything and couldn't write to the filesystem - couldn't, for instance, reset a password due to read only fs (I don't remember the exact message, but that was the essence of it).

Can't write to existing fs and can't mount another - that pretty much shoots it for now, at least for me.  I never did try to start X.

It bears watching though - maybe down the road it will be different.

[mocore]

the entire "distro" can be rebuilt from scratch with ease.

Thanks for mentioning that detail !,

Before i started to booting linux , i thaught this was how 'everything' with open source / soft would be working .
Now the more i read about package managment (nix ,ect) and building stuff , and find the odd missing dep ! im suprised any thing works 

 

[core-user]

Thanks for the heads up, hadn't come across it before, one to keep an eye on.