The developmental release of the beautifully "near-microscopic" Damn Small Linux 4.0 Alpha1 has been released on 17 July 2007. This is what Damn Small Linux's fans have been really longing for. Happy, no. Euphoric, yes!

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've been looking at a very interesting variant of Linux called Damn Small Linux, (hereafter called DSL). Its 3 major contributors have basically taken a minimalist approach to Linux and have created a system that can provide a basic desktop running on an OS that's right around 50 Megabytes.

The Damn Small Linux (DSL) project team on June 19 announced the availability of the first release candidate of the next version of its live CD mini-distribution based on Debian Linux. Damn Small Linux 3.4 features a 2.4.26 kernel and a lightweight Fluxbox desktop environment, the team said.

It's been a while since I've played with Damn Small. The last time I used it regularly was on an old Gateway Solo laptop someone at work dumped on me. The fact that I could run a new OS (however small) on an ancient Pentium 3 with 16MB of RAM was a testament to its usefulness.

Who thought a 233 MHz laptop with 64 MB of RAM -- one purchased for $15, mind you -- could run so damn well. I've been using Firefox to handle my e-mail (and now to post this entry), with Damn Small Linux 3.3 as the Linux distro, and I must say that I am very, very pleased with the way everything's working.

The latest version, V4.0 RC3, of Damn Small Linux was released today and it is really very small indeed. Described as a 50Mb mini-desktop oriented Linux OS, DSL is actually small enough to fit and boot from a business card CD as a live Linux distribution.

At a mere 50MB, Damn Small Linux (DSL) seems like it would be more at home in the realm of rescue disks instead of Desktop OSs.

I had a look around at the state of the art in Linuxes that boot from USB and I come across a little gem: DSL USB Embedded. DSL is Damn Small Linux and is an old 2.4 kernel and 50 megabytes of applications, a minimal system with hand-picked useful apps.