DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: wish list, 2.6

I'm all for a small base to be extended via MyDSL, as long as the base has enough (X, JWM, etc.) for newbies to get started and easily extend DSL.

Very important to me: giving a new lease on life to old computers with (usually) low ram. Although I can always go back to older versions of DSL if and when newer versions stop working on the legacy hardware, I would find that a real drag ... it is pretty cool to run the latest version of an actively maintained distro on these old machines!

Here's a newbie-level question: could a base DSL have both kernels available, and offer the user the choice of which kernel to launch, assuming both kernels (and "minimal stuff for newbies") could fit in 50MB?

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Here's a newbie-level question: could a base DSL have both kernels available, and offer the user the choice of which kernel to launch, assuming both kernels (and "minimal stuff for newbies") could fit in 50MB?

No, if DSL stays in the 50MB range it's one or the other.

lucky13,

Could that be possible if you stripped out fat apps from the base like firefox? No idea. It is an interesting option. I remember when Mepis and others gave you the kernel boot option.

Chris

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Could that be possible if you stripped out fat apps from the base like firefox? No idea. It is an interesting option. I remember when Mepis and others gave you the kernel boot option.

That choice was one of the things I liked about Mepis-Lite, but the goal with that wasn't a tiny base (just KOffice instead of OpenOffice, etc.).

I suspect any tiny core 2.6 will very likely already not include anything like firefox. My earlier description isn't going to leave very much room unless more modules are removed. You're looking at 2.6 with reasonable modules for "average" computers (meaning vintage and bleeding edge users will need to visit MyDSL to get their modules), tiny X, one very small window manager, Robert's scripts, GTK1, and just enough apps -- dillo, sylpheed, emelfm, axyftp, etc. -- so one can connect to set up what they want. The more modules removed, the more stuff can be included. I think, though, that it's more important to include a healthy variety of modules so DSL can run in the first place. It's one thing to modularize things like apps, it's another to expect new users to be able to understand why the CD doesn't even boot up like old versions or like other distros do without having to download modules separately.

The size differences between kernels are pretty staggering. I don't remember the differences between 2.4.28 and 2.6.12 in Mepis-Lite (iirc -- I'm more sure about 2.4 version than 2.6 because I only booted 2.4). I have a hunch that both of those maxed out with modules would be close to the same size as 2.6.23.14 by itself.

This is uncompressed:

Code Sample

$ du --si --max-depth=0 /lib/modules/2.6.23.14/
64M /lib/modules/2.6.23.14/

I admit that's with a lot of stuff that would be moved out as modules because I didn't select "no" to very much. But it's going to be very big by the nature of the beast -- 2.6 is scalable, but scalability isn't easily done in the generic way desktop users need a kernel to be (especially on a live CD intended for use on a wide variety of hardware). FWIW, I'm using the 2.6.23.1 i-686 kernel from Debian Sid on this computer now and it's nine MB smaller than the one I have. For comparison, here's DSL-current on a hard drive install on this drive:

Code Sample

$ du --si --max-depth=0 /mnt/hda2/lib/modules/2.4.31
21M /mnt/hda2/lib/modules/2.4.31

IIRC, Robert said his tinycore proof of concept was 39 MB and with kernel 2.6.19. Maybe that was earlier in this thread? That gives a *little* room if you move SCSI and other modules out of 2.4.

Maybe it can be done relatively painlessly, but I don't see it as being very desirable for most users. Unless users don't care about 50MB.

That gets to my biggest complaint about including two kernels: it flies in the face of the "damn small" philosophy and you're most likely to only run one kernel at a time anyway.

Thought it was worth asking. You made some very good points!

Thanks

Chris

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