Levi Reiss asked:


Can you remember the 1992 Janet Jackson song entitled The Best Things In Life Are Free? You might even remember the 1956 Hollywood movie of the same name. In any case do not guarantee that you will find Damn Small Linux and our associated tutorials to be among the best things in your life. On the other hand we do guarantee that they are both completely free. Well, wait a minute. They are both free, but…

You may have to shell out some of your hard-earned cash to learn Linux. This is particularly true if you are downloading the software and running the tutorials on your home computer. Yes, you will have to pay for an Internet connection at least for the time spent downloading the files. By today’s bloated standards Damn Small Linux is really small; it weighs in at a mere 50 Megabytes. Downloading this software distribution is really quick, especially if you have a high-speed connection. And yet as we all know, sometime during the following month your Internet Service Provider will want money.

After downloading Damn Small Linux you won’t need the Internet to run it. But you may want to activate one or both of the Internet browsers that are part of the Damn Small Linux distribution. And you may want to download additional applications; there are lots of them. Because Damn Small Linux is so small you should still have scads of disk space available.

Your Damn Small Linux costs don’t end with the Internet. I would be surprised to learn that the electricity powering your computer is free. Surely the longer your days and nights spent in front of the computer the higher your light and heat bill. Furthermore, the more time you spend on Linux the more money you may end up spending on snacks, new eyeglasses, and taxis when you miss the bus to work because you just couldn’t tear yourself away from the computer in time. I think you get my drift. But we repeat. Damn Small Linux, this website, and many of the references on the web are free. Should you outgrow Damn Small Linux the larger versions of Linux are free, or at least quite inexpensive when compared to ostensibly similar versions of Microsoft Windows.

Most people don’t run operating systems in and of themselves but rather for the applications they enable. Reason number two: Damn Small Linux provides lots of free applications as discussed in our next article.