DSL

I have been toying with DSL (Damn Small Linux) off and on for several years. A Linux distro that you can easily download over dial-up can be a very good thing. I recently downloaded the newest version and installed it to a one gig flash drive. I expected that to be much more difficult then it actually was. I had read about all the hoops that people had to jump through in the past to get it working. That has been fixed by an included installer that works pretty much out of the box. I am going to use it with my laptop because I want to figure out how to get the wireless working under linux but I would rather not install linux on it right now. It works just fine the way it is.

Solaris and sunder

The last time I posted I had only loaded the solaris disk. Since then I tried to actually use it off of the live cd. It works but is extremly slow. I think that it would be useable if it was installed though. It has Xwindows with Gnome which is part of the reason it is so slow. Gnome is nice but I think that it should probably not be used on live CDs. I also downloaded MilaX. MilaX is a derivative of Solaris which far fewer resources. It loads Xwindows and uses JWM as it’s window manager it runs quite nicely on both my laptop and my desktop. It does not have much of the way of included software however and has a very dark theme. I need to fiddle with it some more I think. It has much potential if I can just figure out how to make it look like I want it to. Of course that is really a moot point as I don’t have a machine to install it to so all my changes would disappear with a reboot. I think I will have to aquire another flash drive to install it to.

OpenSolaris Test Run

On September 26th I ordered OpenSolaris from Sun.  I was amazed when I got it yesterday.  Sun sends out the CDs free if you request them.  They seem to have stolen that idea from Ubuntu.

The disk is a installable live CD.  It works on my desktop but not on my laptop.  I think the lack of a wired connection is what killed it on my laptop because at the point where it died on my laptop it configured the networking on my desktop.  It wants a lot of memory though.  It was very sluggish in 512 megs of ram.

I think it will be worth learning but It will have to wait for another time though.  I will have to get another computer to install it on.  I don’t have the resources to do that right now.

Brother HL-2040 Laser printer

 

I have successfully installed a printer on my Ubuntu Linux Box.  All it took was plugging it in.  The computer found and configured it by itself.