DSLinux Voted Off The Island

I'm giving Damn Small Linux (DSLinux) the boot.

It exhibited bizarre behavior, and I never felt like I could trust it to work. Two quick examples: To exit the Window Manager, I'd use the Shutdown menu option off the system folder. That would result in the Window Manager closing and leaving a command line. Typing 'exit' from the command line would . . . restart the Window Manager! What's linux for 'GO AWAY'? It may have been user error, but it is darn goofy behavior, and there was no indication of what to do differently. Besides, you'd think the 'Shutdown' menu option would, er, shut the machine down.

The other odd behavior I encountered was that the shell window, the console, would spring up when you clicked its dedicated button at the bottom of the screen. It would spring up the first time. When I finished my session, I exited the command line, and it appeared to exit normally. After that, the console was MIA. The second, third, and subsequent attempts to launch the console would have no result. This again sounds like you're doing it wrong, but it's CLICKING A BUTTON. How wrong can you be? It looks to me like it don't work.

And then there's the ugly damn wallpaper. That must be where the 'damn' in Damn Small Linux comes from. It's a silly subject to use all this vitriol on, but the desktop was so ugly it was distracting. And I looked and looked for a way to change the wallpaper and couldn't find it. All I could find was 'Change Theme' which didn't do anything.

I'm sure DSLinux is fine for some things, just not any of the three things I tried to do with it.

I think I'll use Knoppix 5.1 for the time being, until I can get my system installed with PC-BSD. (Ironically, DSLinux is based upon Knoppix. Except Knoppix works right. BA-ZING! Okay, enough DSLinux abuse . . .)