Damn Small Linux and the changes I need to make to it
Damn Small Linux is a great mini Linux distribution that fits on a 50mb CD (i.e. a business card sized one). It has just about everything one needs to be “productive” on a Linux system without a lot of fluff. Furthermore, you can install it on your harddrive, install it to a USB pendrive, which you can boot off of on recent hardware. I use it on my work laptop when I want to use my work laptop for things other than work. Since it doesn’t touch or need the local hard drive (which is encrypted due to work policies), it’s a great way of keeping things seperate. Since it’s a small distribution, and my laptop has lots of RAM, I can load the entire thing to RAM and still have plenty of wiggle room.
Unfortunately, on the IBM T41 laptop I have, and because of the difference between how Linux and Windows deal with case sensitivity on file names, I have to make two changes to the Damn Small Linux distribution. So when I load Damn Small on a USB stick, here’s what I’ve gotta do:
copy the minirt24.gz to /opt (evtl. make a backup to minirt24.gz.old)
at /opt
“gunzip minirt24.gz”
and
“mount -o loop minirt24 /mnt/test”
“cd /mnt/test”
and edit the linuxrc file
in the linuxrc file have a search for
“KNOPPIX_NAME=KNOPPIX” #(almost near at the beginning)
and replace it with
“KNOPPIX_NAME=knoppix”
I also need to edit the line that says:
USB_MODULES=
and remove the echi-hcd.o from this line, else booting from USB panics the system
“cd /opt”
and
umount /ramdisk/opt/minirt24
than
gzip -9 minirt24
copy now the minirt24.gz back and overwrite the old minirt24.gz
And then, simplicity.
