DSL Talk

Not Your Father's Operating System
A Developer's Perspective of DSL

What follows is the history of the major design decisions that make DSL what it is today.

As a commercial Linux appliance developer (see: www.shingledecker.org), I had made my own desktop appliances based on Red Hat 6.2 using Icewm. I would occasionally checkout Distrowatch to see if others had similar ideas.

Most everyone knows that operating systems are installed onto hard drives. I had grown tired of installing OS onto hard drives. I had just completed work on several server appliances that do not install to hard drive. Instead they run from a combination of multiple ramdisks and cdrom.

There are many plan on the road map to dsl 1.0. Each new release we make progress.

There lately have been some trying to do persistentancy. All of these are on the road map. Some will affect the extensions. Even changing the user from damnsmall to dsl has impacted the extensions. If we try to do too many changes at once it can become unmanageable. Some of us know the "fun" we had in moving to the 0.9.0 release.

I am aware of the user community's desires. Giving user complete control of the icons and working smoothly will all the various methods of installs and persistentacy is all part of the plan.