OK, so maybe I bore easily.
Noodling around for a solution to dual boot Son&Heir’s XBox, I found and downloaded “Damn Small Linux” in several flavors for the heck of it. Unpacked the “DSL-embedded” version, ran dsl-base.bat using WINE and…
QEMU/Knoppix bootloader brought up a DSL live session.
Crazy.
Next: VMWare Server and an actual installation (VM install, of course) of the OS.
Why not? After all my years of parsimonious hard drive space allocation, I find it pleasuable to cut another 8-10GiB out of the herd to install yet another VM. 😉
OK, installed and running, now. Hmmm, it’s “as OK” as the QEMU “ermbedded” version. As always, the Dillo browser sucks dead bunnies through a straw, but since I installed this version in a VM, installing another browser is a trivial task. Oh, I see Firefox is available. It’s not bad, but since I set this up to run in an 800X600 window, Firefox just Will Not Do (Firefox sort of enlarges fonts, etc., but does a crappy job of it).
Not as slick as Puppy Linux, save for its auto-configuration of network resources, but I can see where it’d be very useful for folks with older computers, and in fact I may install this on some old Pentium or Pentium II computer laying around here at twc central. Pretty nice. Probably won’t keep this VM around any longer than it takes me to become familiar with the DSL GUI, but it’s a nice, lean OS from wht I’ve seen thus far.
OK, for more OS-ey fun, I decided to “upgrade” VMWare Server to version 2, since the thing’s been nagging me to do so. 503MiB download. No console any more, just a browser management window that requires me to do some funky stuff like download a plugin to make the thing work. *feh* Took a perfectly workable console and screwed it up. Oh, things still run mostly OK, but some features are missing (where’s my sound? USB? Heck, where’s shared input between host and client? Screw thi silly “CTRL+ALT to release the mouse/keyboard, and no cur n paste between host and client? It’s all gotta be there somewhere… ) and it’s a darned sight clunkier than the old console. Oh. Well. That’s progress, I suppose.