USB Damn Small Linux (DSL) This is a revisit of the Windows DSL USB installation tutorial: "Putting damn small linux on a USB pendrive". Damn Small Linux was created by John Andrews of damnsmalllinux.org and is basically a trimmed down version of an early Knoppix build, making it perfect for smaller drives. Based on the 2.4 kernel, DSL is great to use for older and slower computers as well. It will fit and run on portable devices or drives as small as 64MB.
Damn Small Linux Screenshots:
Portable Damn Small Linux Basic essentials:
- A 64MB or larger USB flash drive
- HP-USB Format tool (optional)
- 7-Zip (or another extracting utility)
- Syslinux
- dsl-embedded.zip
Damn Small Linux USB install tutorial:
- Download the HP-USB Format tool and format your flash drive using the Fat or Fat32 option
- Download the dsl-embedded.zip and extract the contents using 7-Zip to your "USB flash drive"
- Download syslinux-3.36.zip and unzip the files to a directory called syslinux on your computer
- From Windows click start-> run-> cmd
- From the command window, type cd \syslinux\win32
- Type syslinux.exe -ma X: (replace X with your USB drive letter) to make the drive bootable
- Reboot your computer and set your system BIOS or Boot Menu to boot from the USB device. In some cases, you might also need to set the hard disk boot priority to boot from the USB stick if your BIOS lists the device as a hard drive.
Notes: It is possible to "boot DSL using Qemu emulation" without the need to reboot the PC. See the included readme file that was written by the authors of DSL.
If you still can't get DSL to work, you can try this full installation tutorial direct from the DSL wiki