Damn Small Linux

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a Linux book that caught my attention. I'd never noticed it before on the bookshelves in my local bookstore. Being curious, I picked it up, skimmed through it and bought it on the spot. My life changed for the better that day. The book's title is "The Official Damn Small Linux Book." It renewed and further strengthened my commitment to all things Linux.

Damn Small Linux(DSL for short) is a full blown Linux distribution which is incredibly small in size, under 50mb. From the book-

"DSL is a is a fully functional mini-live CD desktop operating system. Despite its size, DSL can do just about everything you would expect from a modern desktop system, such as browse the web, send and receive email, write documents, manage files, play music, work with spreadsheets, and manipulate images."

DSL comes with the following applications-

• Aterm Afterstep terminal emulator
  
• Fluxbox XWindows Manager
  
• Firefox web broswer
  
• Dillo light weight web browser
  
• Monkey web server
  
• Lua programming language
  
• Open Secure Shell
  
• EmelFm file manager
  
• gRun GTK based run dialog
  
• Siag spreadsheet
  
• Sylpheed email client
  
• Rdesktop remote desktop protocol client
  
• VNC remote desktop protocol client
  
• XMMS multimedia system
  
• Xpaint image manipulation and painting program
  
• Nano text editor
  
• Vim text editor
  
• SQLite self contained RDBMS
  
• and many, many more.