Getting APT on Damn Small Linux, in 2016

I wanted to give Damn Small Linux (referred to as DSL for the rest of this post) a quick whirl since I got bored, and successfully got it on a hard drive. And I saw I could install apt.

But, with such an out of date OS, there were bound to be problems. The largest problem I had was that the 2 APT mirrors I found were down. But, I got a bit creative, downloaded the dsl-dpkg and MD5 checksums, uploaded them to here, so now, here’s the updated 2016 tutorial, on how to get APT working on Damn Small Linux. The easy way.

Disclaimer: This was performed on DSL 4.4.10. It may be way different for older editions of DSL!

First, a few things you’ll need to do before getting started. If you haven’t already, set a root password, as it simplifies the process greatly when you get things working. Enter the terminal, and change the password by doing this command:

su root

And the entire little program will help you through setting a root password. To successfully check if you did it right, type in this command:

su

And if you did it right, you should see this in your command prompt:

root@box:~#

(where it says box, that may be different, depending on your hostname.)

Next, it’s time to modify the hosts for downloading dpkg. Do this by entering this command as root:

nano /opt/.dslrc

On line one of the file, change the line to this:

Mirror: distro.ibiblio.org/damnsmall

Keep the second line set to http.

(I’ve ended support for my DSL mirror, and I instead recommend you use ibiblio’s mirror instead.)

To exit out of nano, type in Control-O, then Control-M, and lastly, Control-X.

Next, right click on your desktop. Navigate into the folder called “Apps”, then to the folder called “Tools”, and click on the problem “Enable Apt” again.

APT should be downloaded to your computer now. To verify, as root, type in this command:

apt-get install

And there you have it, but almost. Since the default sources have barely any packages, let’s make it so you have tons of packages available to download.

As root, type in this command:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

And on lines 2-4, replace them with this:

deb http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb http://mirror.linux.org.au/debian stable main contrib non-free
line 4 is now empty, so put nothing on line 4 replacing the usc.edu source.

Be sure to remove the hashtags, as not removing them renders the sources invalid!

When exiting, be sure to do Control-O, Control-M, and then Control-X.

Once you are all done, go ahead, and run apt-get update as root.

But, there’s yet ANOTHER problem you’ll run into, and you’ll likely get an error with the Dynamic MMap running out of room. How do you fix that you ask? And this part, believe me, is a nightmare to deal with.

Here’s how:

First, nano into the file that sets the Dynamic MMap (the apt cache):

nano /etc/apt/apt.conf

Next, on line 2, modify the number set in the APT Cache-Limit. This number is in bytes, so be reminded of that. For this tutorial, let’s use around 128 MB of memory. Set line 2 to this:

APT::Cache-Limit "1280000000";

Go ahead and save the file. You probably know how to at this point. Next, type in this command:

nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf

And add a new line with these contents:

APT::Cache-Limit "1280000000";

Go ahead and type in apt-get update again. If all goes well, you should get no errors with APT.

And that is how you fix APT on Damn Small Linux, so you can install all of your packages.

If you do have readlink problems with packages, I’ll be explaining that whole procedure in yet another post. The post after this one, of course.