I’m a big fan of simplicity, and minimalism, a function over form sort of person. I’m also a fan of Linux, so it’s probably not surprising that I’m a big fan of D@mn Small Linux. Rather than sing it’s praises, I’ll let you visit their site to see what it’s all about. There’s much to be said for it, nearly all of it good.

The basic system is just under 50MB in size, but a lot of other useful applications (and games!) are available as add-on packages. Compiling stuff under DSL is a bit of a pain, especially when you’re live-booting off a CD, so precompiled binaries are your friend here.

One of my stranger “must have” applications is LCD4Linux, a daemon that can display various bits of system information on a serial or parallel LCD display. Yes, I’m a nerd, what can I say…

For those who’d like to use this nifty program on their own DSL system, I’ve packaged the necessary files and made them available for download.

Windows .zip format (233k)
.tar.gz format (233k)

If in doubt, you probably want the second package.

These packages consist of two files, the executable “lcd4linux”, and the basic vanilla lcd4linux.conf configuration file. The executable can live anywhere (/usr/local/bin/ is an appropriate choice, though you’ll need to add it to .filetool.lst), and the default location for the configuration file is /etc/lcd4linux.conf, though I believe it can be overriden by a command-line option. With the .zip file you may have to chown and chmod the lcd4linux program appropriately (chmod 755 should be fine). The program doesn’t create a man page, so none is included.

Currently, this is the binary and sample configuration file for LCD4Linux-0.10.0, compiled for Damn Small Linux (DSL) on a PIII running Debian/stable with a 2.6.8 kernel. It’s been verified to work with 16×2, 20×2, and 20×4 HD44780-compatible text LCDs under DSL 2.2 on both an Athlon XP2400+ and an old Tyan Thunder dual PII. It’s strictly “as-is“, no warranty expressed or implied.

LCD4Linux lives at lcd4linux.bulix.org, which is the correct location to go to for support, et cetera. Enjoy!