cant any one tell me what damn small linux- not is based on? is it debian? and where could i learn the commands for the command line i this?

any help is appreciated

ti.

DSL-N (as I understand it) is an offshoot of DSL which is a highly modified offshoot of KNOPPIX, which I believe is Debian based. Whew!!!

Both DSL-N and DSL use Fluxbox for their desktop environment rather than GNOME or KDE. They both provide bash for CLI. I don't think there are other shells provided. While they will each execute many of the CLI commands you are used to in Linux, many of these are carried out using Busybox, and as such have much more limited options than you may be used to.

I would suggest you download one or both, and try them as live CDs.

If you have old hardware use dsl if you have new hardware and sata drive use dsl-n. Both are separate products and they are different.
I have mine is a small pendrive I bought from them (they need some $ support!). The pendrive came with dsl but I switch to dsl-n. Of course they have pendrives with dsl-n. The pendrive is great and I carry with me on the road mainly as a backup of the laptop. I have another laptop with dsl-n in the HD that works great.
They way dsl do things is a little different however is so fast with minimal resources and you can do almost everything.
One of these days I will try to install mythtv on it. Now my project is to run an ait tape drive from dsl-n.

Ciao

-=terry(Denver)=-

what commands do you use in fluffbox?

http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/docs/en/faq.php

-=terry(Denver)=-

Its off knoppix, it is a small OS (50mb) with little features, but runs fast. Great for slow pc's.

You mean fluxbox? Fluxbox is your graphical environment. The CLI commands do not depend on fluxbox. These commands are pretty much what you are used to in a full-blown Linux distro, but many of them have more limited options because they are executed using busybox instead of the regular GNU programs.

terryxela provided you a link to the fluxbox FAQ, but I didn't see any screen shoots. Take a look at this page for links to screenshots from DSL-N and a list of its applications.

If you can burn CDs, I strongly urge you to download DSL (50MB) or DSL-N (slightly greater than 90MB) and take a look for yourself. You will get a much better idea than I or any one else can give you on this forum. Or, you could put it on a USB flash drive if your computer is capable of booting from one. Even under dialup, a 50 MB download is feasible. If you can't burn a CD and USB won't work for you, the link above also provides links for buying a CD.

google "linux commands" and you will find a wealth of information. I did. Also, when you get a terminal window in your newly installed linux, do a "ls /bin", "ls /sbin" and you will find a listing of most , if not all the commands you can run. If you type "set" in a terminal window, you will see a variable called "path" with many directories in it. These are where you should look for commands which are available.