Damn Small Linux is a
Knoppix-based
LiveCD distribution made to fit on a 50-megabyte
business-card sized CD. It has a variety of minimalist programs chosen to fit into as little space as possible, while providing maximum functionality. It uses the excellent
Fluxbox window manager and
Firefox as a browser (an exception to the minimalist rule).
It's extremely fast, even on older hardware (my
Pentium II laptop blazes on it), and because it's so insanely small can be completely loaded into
RAM on most modern machines. It is also possible to add more applications (different window manager, browsers, etc) to the LiveCD as required (in .dsl packages). As it's a
debian-based distribution, apt-get can be enabled and more packages installed from the
Debian repositories.
It can be used from:
a memory stick, within Windows (using
qemu), and in many other weird and wonderful ways.