As nearly as I can recall, I first tried Damn Small Linux (DSL) some time around 2005. Back then, my main computer was a creaky, eight-year-old old Dell Latitude CpiA laptop that only contained 32 MB of RAM. I never managed to install the maximum amount (64 MB) because I never found the required EDO RAM for what I thought was a reasonable price. I don't remember which version of DSL I began with, but I still have version 3.4.9 on a CD. At the time, DSL was the only non-persistent distribution I knew that could boot a computer from a CD and load fully into 32 MB RAM. It was incredibly buggy, but it would get me onto the Internet with a reasonable assurance that no malware had come along for the ride. I used it whenever I was forced to interact with highly personal information on line. The last version of DSL to come out was in 2008, so you can imagine my surprise when a cheapskatesguide reader informed me that a new 32-bit version had just come out, 16 years later. Of course I had to try it, if just for the sake of nostalgia.

The official DSL website says, "The New DSL 2024 has been reborn as a compact Linux distribution tailored for low-spec x86 computers. It packs a lot of applications into a small package. All the applications are chosen for their functionality, small size, and low dependencies. DSL 2024 also has many text-based applications that make it handy to use in a term window or TTY." Some of the applications included in the distribution are listed on the main page. I was particularly looking forward to trying the Badwolf browser. I love the name. The DSL 2024 ISO file also contains other browsers--Dillo, W3M, and Links2. I was first introduced to Dillo by DSL back in 2005. I toyed with the Sylpheed email client back then and found it to be usable. Abiword was atrociously buggy, to the point of being absolutely unusable on my Latitude CPiA.

The explanation for a new DSL version being released can be found at the bottom of the main page of the DSL website. The developer says, "The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD, or a hard limit of 700 MB. This project is meant to service older computers and have them continue to be useful far into the future. Such a notion sits well with my values. I think of this project as my way of keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills." You can't see me screaming, "Yes! Yes! Yes!," as I jump up and down in front of my desk. Finally, someone else is making an effort to give us a Linux distribution that we can use on our ancient but beloved PC's.

As a cheapskate, one of my pet computing issues has always been the desire to keep old computers functional for as long as possible. Throwing away perfectly good computers simply because software developers are pathologically opposed to updating software for them strikes me as wasteful in the extreme. Add to this the looming crises of discarded computers in landfills poisoning our environment and the fact that we are rapidly running out of the rare-earth elements necessary to build them. We have no one but ourselves to blame for this, and I think this wastefulness needs to stop right now. This is why am pleased to see any software developer making an effort to create or update software for old computers. I applaud the developer of DSL 2024 in particular for his effort.

The developer says DSL 2024 is an alpha version based on AntiX 23, which I experimented with as recently as a few weeks ago. My feelings about AntiX are mixed. I am grateful that it exists, because until I was told about DSL 2024, AntiX was the only distribution I knew that would run on any of my 20-year-old PC's. On the other hand, it is a bit buggy, and its desktop environments are fairly old and non-standard. It also refused to install on a micro SD card in an IDE-to-micro-SD adapter that I was using in place of a hard drive on my 2004 Dell Precision M20. As I contemplated writing a review of DSL 2024, I was looking forward to learning if it had addressed any of the bugs in AntiX.

Installing DSL 2024

I downloaded the 666 megabyte DSL 2024 ISO file and the MD5sum file from the download page. The command "md5sum dsl-2024.alpha.iso" showed that the ISO file had not been tampered with. I first tried copying the ISO file onto a USB flash drive with the command

sudo dd if=dsl-2024.alpha.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror status=progress

My Dell Precision M20 laptop booted from the DSL 2024 flash drive without problems. The result was a desktop that looked very much like Antix23, complete with Conky (which can be toggled on or off from DSL's main menu). Conky showed only 106 MB of RAM and one percent of the CPU's capability in use. The CPU on this machine was a 1.86 GHz Intel M Pentium (Centrino).

I tried performing some basic tasks from the USB flash drive. Another USB flash drive mounted automatically when I plugged it into the M20, and I was able to unmount it using the GUI file manager. I also managed to change the screen resolution with the XRandR GUI application under menu item Control Centre/Session. An MP4 file (H264 MPEG-4 AVC, 720x404 resolution) played just fine (if a bit jerkily) in the MPV Media Player at a screen resolution of 1400x1050. These days, most of the Linux video player software is so inefficient that it will not play a DVD or MP4 video without noticeable jerkiness on anything less that a mid-range Core 2 DUO CPU, circa 2007. That was not the case with similar software that ran on Windows XP computers, which would play DVD's without jerkiness on CPU's with clock speeds as low as 500 megahertz. An MP3 file played in XMMS, and I could change the sound level from within XMMS. I had to search for a while for a way of changing the system sound level. I finally found it on a hard-to-read icon on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Badwolf did not appear to be able to access any web pages. Badwolf is a minimal, privacy oriented, Webkit2gtk browser. I found it to be too stripped down for my tastes, but those who value privacy above all else might choose to use it. It also appeared to be using old security certificates, so websites with modern TLS certificates did not appear to be compatible. I fixed the out-of-date certificate issue by updating my computer's clock from March 1, 2005 to the correct date with the Linux command, "sudo date --set="20240208 06:30:00". I have mostly given up on replacing BIOS batteries on these old laptops, because they just go bad again in a year or two, and they are often hard to replace. I never managed to reach a website with Badwolf on the M20, but the other browsers included with DSL 2024 did work.

Even though the DSL 2024 flash drive was non-persistent (so any changes I made would be gone when I rebooted), I wanted to try installing some Linux packages. I typed "sudo -s" to become root. Then, I entered the root password "demo" at the password prompt and ran the command "apt-get update --fix-missing". I was then able to install the Seamonkey browser using "apt-get install seamonkey".

I also tried booting two other other computers with the DSL 2024 flash drive, my Lenovo Thinkpad T500 and my Dell Latitude D6220. The D6220 booted and allowed me to download more applications using apt-get. I noticed that Badwolf allowed me to reach websites on this machine. After booting from the DSL 2024 flash drive, the Thinkpad T500 crashed every time I tried to do just about anything, including something as basic as opening a terminal window, but changing the window manager to FluxBox remedied that.

Next, I tried installing DSL 2024 onto the micro SD card that served as the hard drive of my Dell Precision M20. I wanted to see if it would fail with DSL 2024, as it had with AntiX. I used all the default settings during the installation and created a user name and password and root password. As expected, when I tried booting from the micro SD card, the computer could not find any bootable devices.

I tried installing DSL 2024 onto my Dell Latitude D400, in which I had just installed a "new" 40 GB Hitachi IDE hard drive. This laptop contained 768 GB of RAM. Booting from the USB flash drive took a full 3 minutes, thanks to the fact that the D400's USB port is USB 1.0. The Smartmon tool checked the drive before installing and let me know that the drive would most likely experience a higher than average failure rate in the near future. In other words, the seller had probably lied when he said this was a new hard drive. After a successful installation, the D400 booted by default into zzz-Fluxbox, and Conky said that 2.87 GB of the hard drive were in use for the root partition and another 743 MB had been reserved for a swap partition (even though Gparted did not show a swap partition). Conky also claimed that only 84 MB of RAM were in used, even though it had shown 210 MB in use when the computer was booted from the USB flash drive. The Linux "free -m" command reported 196 MB of RAM in use, 400 free, 743 total, and 742 as "swap".

The D400's WiFi card was picking up nearby WiFi access points, so it seemed to be working, although I never tested it. I used an Ethernet cable to download Linux packages.

Further Testing

Perhaps the primary consideration for any Linux distribution that is designed to run on old computers is the amount of RAM required by its included applications. I can't tell you how many times I have seen distributions that are designed to be "light" packaged with the newest versions of Firefox or Chrome that require more than the distributions' minimum RAM requirements to run. These things are beasts that simply will not run on old computers with 1 GB of RAM or less. I can't understand why the maintainer of any Linux distribution that is designed for old computers would do this.

I took this review as an opportunity to get an idea of the amount of RAM that is used by the browsers that are included in the DSL ISO file. Unfortunately, modern operating systems reserve memory that they are not actually using, so determining the memory required for each application is difficult. Nevertheless, below are the RAM usages in megabytes (immediately after booting each browser) as indicated by the Linux "free -m" command, the Linux "top" command, and Conky. I have added the Pale Moon browser for comparison, which is a light browser that does not come with DSL 2024 but can be added with the command "sudo apt-get install palemoon".

Some of the applications that I have not already mentioned that come with the DSL 2024 ISO are the Ranger file manager, Visidata spreadsheets, the Sylpheed and Mutt email clients, the CDW CD burner, the WeeChat IRC Client, the Alsamixer, the Cmus music player, the Vim and Nano text editors, Leafpad, the mtPaint graphics editor, the UFW firewall, gFTP, the Zathura PDF viewer, AbiWord (I did not investigate to see if it works any better now than it did in 2005), Gnumeric (another spreadsheet program), and a small assortment of utility applications (not including Gparted, which can be installed with apt-get). Some of these can only be accessed from the Linux command line.

I reset the date on my D400 and then used "apt-get install" to download the Seamonkey browser and the YouTube downloader, yt-dlp. The yt-dlp application recently stopped working again on my Parrot OS laptop. Apparently, Parrot OS uninstalled it without asking me after also removing some of its dependencies from my laptop and Parrot OS's repository. Why Parrot OS removed what it had previously installed on my laptop without asking first is a mystery. By the way, why does the YouTube downloader never seem to work for more than a few months at a time on any of my computers under any operating system that I have ever tried it on? Seamonkey and yt-dlp both worked well in DSL 2024 on my D400. Surprisingly, the Badwolf browser also worked on my D400! In fact, it worked well enough to log into my Blue Dwarf social media account and add some comments. One of Blue Dwarf's key features that I am most proud of is its ability to work with just about any browser ever created, including many of those that came out all the way back in the 1990's.

I also installed Gparted, Bleachbit, nmap, gedit, and the Liferea RSS feed reader. They all seemed to work. Then, I copied over the AppImage of the Lagrange Gemini browser that runs perfectly on Parrot OS. DSL 2024 did not seem to know what to do with it. That is a shame because surfing the Gemini network would have been an ideal use for this old computer. I do not want to go back to the AV-98 Gemini browser after using the beautiful Lagrange browser, but I may have to on this computer.

None of the applications that I installed with apt-get showed up in DSL's system menu, so I had to run them from the command line. I believe items can be added manually to Fluxbox's menu, but I did not want to learn the process, which I feel may be somewhat involved, based on my vague memories of doing that fifteen or more years ago on DSL. I have found that level of effort to be mostly wasted, because my Linux installations tend to last no longer than six to eight months for one reason or another. I really should dedicate more of my time to learning to repair broken Linux installations, but re-installing is so much easier in the short term.

DSL 2024 retains a subset of the windows managers that are supported by AntiX 23. In addition to Fluxbox, I saw zzz-Fluxbox, Minimal Fluxbox, zzz-JWM, Minimal JVM, and JVM. None of these are as modern or convenient to use as MATE or even xfce, but they require significantly less RAM and are, therefore, much better suited to running on 20-year-old computers.

For my final test of the DSL 2024 flash drive's ability to boot old computers, I tried booting my 2004 Compaq Presario V5000. Unfortunately, it reached a certain point fairly far into the the boot sequence where is seemed to be repeatedly cycling through a section of the sequence. I have never seen this behavior with any other Linux distribution. Either they boot, or they freeze at some point. They do not cycle. This is unfortunate. I tried booting again in the "Failsafe Boot" mode. Although I saw nothing but horizontal lines at one point in the boot sequence, the V5000 did successfully boot, and in about half of the time required for the D400, thanks to the USB 2.0 port on the V5000. I noticed that no WiFi access points were detected. The V5000 has a light-up hardware WiFi button that several Linux distributions have had problems with. The WiFi button remained dark during the booting of DSL 2024. I pressed it afterwards, and although it lit up, no access points appeared. I connected an Ethernet cable, booted Badwolf, and was able to see Blue Dwarf's website.

When I inserted a USB flash drive into the other USB port of my V5000, DSL 2024 detected it, mounted it automatically, and presented the contents. The GUI file manager has options that allow the user to decide whether to mount a USB drive automatically when it is plugged in. By right clicking on the USB drive in the file manager and selecting "unmount", I was able to unmount the drive. This is important because many older Linux distributions required manual mounting and unmounting of USB drives, and this was just inconvenient enough for me to choose a different distribution whenever I encountered it. In fact, this is why I did not use Linux seriously until around 2009, when Linux Mint 9 finally began to allow users to mount and unmount USB drives from the GUI.

I right clicked on the same MP4 video that I had played on the Dell Precision M20 and selected open/mpv media Player from the menu that came up. The video began to play at the 1024x768 monitor resolution, however a bit jerkily. I noticed that 70% to 90% of the D400's 1.60 GHz Intel Pentium M's CPU was being used. At least the audio and video were correctly synchronized. When I reset the D400's screen resolution to 800x600, the jerkiness was reduced somewhat, but it was still very noticeable, yet the video was watchable.

Final Words

Although I don't understand why, my impression of DSL 2024 is that it works better than AntiX 23. This does not seem logical, so perhaps my appreciation for DSL is simply clouding my judgment. I must say that navigating around in DSL 2024 when it is in the FluxBox mode takes some getting used to after using more modern windows managers like Cinnamon and MATE. DSL 2024 did seem to run from the USB flash drive on all four of the old computers on which I tried it (although I had to use the "Failsafe Boot" mode on one), and all but a few of the applications that I tested actually worked. This is a noticeable improvement over the 2005-2008 versions of DSL, although as I recall, the 2008 version was significantly less buggy than earlier versions. I only tried to install DSL 2024 to the "hard drives" of two of my laptops. Unfortunately, it would not install on the micro USB flash card on my Dell Precision M20.

I am very happy to see the developers of both AntiX and DSL 2024 making an effort to keep old computers alive with useful Linux distributions. And, make no mistake, although DSL 2024 takes some getting used to, it is usable. I hope the developer of DSL 2024 will continue to maintain and perhaps even improve it for years to come. I think this will probably be the Linux distribution that I will use on my old laptops for the foreseeable future.

If you have found this article worthwhile, please share it on your favorite social media. You will find sharing links at the top of the page.

Related Articles:

Linux has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers

A Review of AntiX Linux Running on a Near-Vintage Computer

Saving Linux

The Roll-Out of Windows 11 is the Perfect Time to Decide to Switch to Linux