USB Damn Small Linux install

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, 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 (fat32 formatted)
  
• 7-Zip (or another extracting utility)
  
• Syslinux
• dsl-embedded.zip

Damn Small Linux USB install tutorial:

1. Download the dsl-embedded.zip and extract the contents using 7-Zip to your "USB flash drive"
2. Download syslinux-3.36.zip and unzip the files to your computer. For the rest of this tutorial, we assume the syslinux files were extracted to a directory named syslinux on your local C: drive. You must create this directory.
3. From Windows click start > run > cmd
4. From the command window, type cd \syslinux\win32
   
5. Type syslinux.exe -ma X: (replace X with your USB drive letter) to make the drive bootable
6. 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

Posted under: Flash drive installs using Windows