Dsl 4

[Bungo Pony]

I just gave the new version of DSL a whirl. Honestly, I don't like it. JWM is now the default Window manager, and it's more Windowsy, but I enjoy my Fluxbox. Thankfully they still include it.

Also, why did they change the drive mounting tool? Bottom right hand corner was handy. Opening home, right clicking on the window, selecing mount, and selecting what you want to mount is a pain, especially when I'm mounting more than one drive.

On shutdown, there seems to be a bug at least with the video card I'm using. The screen goes smaller and double, and I can't see what's being prompted (I knew it was asking me to eject and press enter, but that's from experience).

On the plus side, they included a menu item to play an audio CD in XMMS. It took me forever to figure that one out, but I eventually did it.

I would SERIOUSLY suggest using version 3.x instead of 4.x. From what I saw, the changes to the basic layout of DSL were unnecessary.

Anyone else have thoughts on it?

[DJiNN]

I'd have to disagree there. I'm answering this post using DSL 4.2.5 (i think) inside a VM (On Xubuntu 7.10) and it's really good. I can't believe what they cram onto something this small!! :)

There are a few things about it that i'm not 100% with (JWM being one, although it's not THAT bad) but on the whole it's great. Tabbed dillo works well, as does Firefox (Even if it's version 1.06) and there are even a few games on there if you like that kind of thing! :)

I still like Puppy because it's just so bloody good at what it does, and so versatile, but when you consider that the standard Puppy is almost TWICE the size of DSL, i think it's bloody amazing that DSL does all that it does.

Obviously, as with all distros, it's not going to fit everyones vision of a small distro, but it's most certainly going to stay on my hard drive, and i think i'll get a pack of those business card size CD's just so that i can start giving DSL away to friends, so that they can be amazed.

I've got an old PII floating around here somewhere, with a pathetically small hard drive and maybe 128mb Ram.... i'm going to get it out at the weekend & give DSL a real try by installing it, and if it's REALLY good.... i'll keep it there. :)

[Bungo Pony]

Okay, maybe I should take back what I said about the bug, since version 3.x does the same thing on this PC. Probably a hardware issue.

I have no beef about how much they can cram into 50M. But I still think eliminating the mount tool wasn't a good thing. On the PC that I mainly use DSL, I'm usually mounting 3+ drives on it, and I really do appreciate that thing. Adding extra steps to it was a real blow, well for me anyway :) . I was hoping they eliminated it for auto-mounting, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

Another positive about verison 4, I'm glad to see the cleanup of the numerous icons on the desktop. Makes it look a lot cleaner.

[DJiNN]

You know, i completely forgot about you mentioning the Mounting tool.... (Whoops!) :redface: I'll go and have a look at it in a while. It would be good to see something like the tool that's used in Puppy, which is excellent. I guess if you were going to install DSL permanently on a machine, you could set up fstab and mount the drives at boot?

[kerry_s]

i liked the old mount tool better to, i'll probably suggest it to robert, once i look over the forum posts, he might have had a reason to drop it. any way you can enable apt, then just-> sudo apt-get update-> sudo apt-get install mountapp(i think, can't remember ( http://www.dockapps.org/file.php/id/154 )) that's how i got scrot to take the screen shot.
if i remember correctly it was several apps stacked together to make the 1, maybe they moved it to mydsl.

i still think they have done a great job in making it look more updated, i also think jwm is going to be the next great mini wm, it's still young as far as wm's go and it just keeps improving, it's smaller and faster than fluxbox, yet still able to offer the look of a standard setup. give it time.
:)

[DJiNN]

i liked the old mount tool better to, i'll probably suggest it to robert, once i look over the forum posts, he might have had a reason to drop it. any way you can enable apt, then just-> sudo apt-get update-> sudo apt-get install mountapp(i think, can't remember ( http://www.dockapps.org/file.php/id/154 )) that's how i got scrot to take the screen shot.
if i remember correctly it was several apps stacked together to make the 1, maybe they moved it to mydsl.

I think i'm going to do a frugal install of DSL on this old PIII (Which already carries 2 OS's) just to see what it's like when running from the drive. If i do then i'll have a go at installing the mount tool, that's assuming that you can do that with a Frugal install of course? :)

i still think they have done a great job in making it look more updated, i also think jwm is going to be the next great mini wm, it's still young as far as wm's go and it just keeps improving, it's smaller and faster than fluxbox, yet still able to offer the look of a standard setup. give it time.
:)

Fluxbox is really good, but just recently i've been more impressed with OpenBox. It's very configurable, and with all the GUi tools available to help configure it now, it's a lot easier to do so. I'm running TinyMe at the moment (One of the OS's on this old PIII) which uses OpenBox, and it's fantastic. I've not really had a chance to use JWM a lot, so it'll be interesting to get to grips with DSL & see what it's like.

How do you think it compares with OpenBox or IceWM, both of which are (IMHO) really light but with a good feature set and, more importantly perhaps, very fast on older systems such as this?

[Bungo Pony]

I've been playing with TinyMe as well, and I really do like OpenBox as well. I loved the fact that I could click on a menu item to manually configure the menu. I screwed it all up when I regenerated the menu. Boy was I mad! Not only that, but I did it twice so the automatic backup had also been re-written.

[DJiNN]

I've been playing with TinyMe as well, and I really do like OpenBox as well.

It's great isn't it? TinyMe is such a fantastic little distro, it's like PCLOS without the fat, but loads of speed! :)

I loved the fact that I could click on a menu item to manually configure the menu. I screwed it all up when I regenerated the menu. Boy was I mad! Not only that, but I did it twice so the automatic backup had also been re-written.

Sorry to hear that. But i haven't found that ability yet..... unless you're talking about actually configuring the menu (items in the menu etc) using a config tool? I know that you can do that with Obmenu but i didn't think that came with Tiny? What config tool are you using? Or am i missing something so obvious!? (Probably the latter) :lolflag:

[Bungo Pony]

What config tool are you using?

The link in the menu opens up the config file in a text editor. After looking over how it's done, it's really easy to do manually.

Kinda reminds me of my old BBSing days :)

[DJiNN]

What config tool are you using?

To change system configs i use the one that comes with OpenBox, but for menus i use ObMenu as it works really well, and saves doing it manually. :)

The link in the menu opens up the config file in a text editor. After looking over how it's done, it's really easy to do manually.

Kinda reminds me of my old BBSing days :)

LOL.... I know what you mean. Used to have a BBS called "Mists Of Avalon" back around 1990..... great fun indeed, FiDO rocked big time! :)

I don't mind editing the file by hand, but i'm a BIG fan of Gui's to help along the way if possible.... anything to make life a little easier! :)

I'm loving this release of DSL though. It's really fast & just gets better & better! It's not something that i'd use everyday as it's a bit too sparse for that (For me anyway) but it's a useful tool for so many things. It's a great distro for REALLY old comps as well, and works on everything i've installed it on so far..... pretty good going i think! :)