Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems

Lifehacker took four Linux distros, put them on USB flash drives, and ran a Lifehacker Faceoff.

Today we’re detailing four no-install distributions—Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora—and helping you decide which might work for that spare thumb drive you’ve got lying around, or as just a part of your multi-gig monster stick.

Damn Small Linux Makes Darn Big Impression – Small Distro, Big Packages

LinuxPlanet has a review of Damn Small Linux.

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. After booting up into full graphical mode, you may be hooked on this tiny distribution forever. I am impressed with the number of applications and the fact that DSL has two choices for graphical interfaces Window Managers: Fluxbox and jwm see Figures 1 and 2. DSL is based on the Debian Linux distribution.

Review of Damn Small Linux 3.2

Open Addict reviews Damn Small Linux 3.2.

Under the hood, DSL features the 2.4.26 kernel compiled with SMP support. The system had no trouble recognizing the hardware on our test laptop and booted to the desktop in around 30 seconds. DSL is committed to remaining useable on older hardware. In fact the minimum system requirements for this distro are just a 486DX with 16MB of Ram.

A Closer Look at Damn Small Linux

LINUX.SYS-CON.COM dives into the world of Damn Small Linux, and describes some of the more interesting uses of this great lightweight LiveCD.

In this article you will learn how to turn a blank CD and an inexpensive USB keydrive into a powerful, portable, take-along operating system complete with modern applications like Firefox, a Web server, and multimedia tools. All this can be done using free Open Source Linux software.