Saturday, July 10, 2010

Whatever happened to DSL?

I really love(d) DSL.  But it's coming up on 2 years since the last release - I was getting worried, so I started searching for answers.  Funny how this all dried up right after the book was published.  It looks like in fighting took it's toll on the project.  The good news is the is an even cooler tiny Linux distro now: Tiny Core Linux.  This thing is TINY!  It boots a Linux 2.6 kernel and runs X in under 10MB!!  Watch this flash demo!  I burned the image to a CD and booted my favorite obsolete notebook - it ran great!  I'm looking forward to installing this on some old junkers I've got around here to see how much more functional they become.  It has some similarities with DSL since it is the pet project of Robert Shingledecker, one of the main developers of DSL and authors of the DSL book.  Because of that,  I expect the stability to be pretty good and package management to be pretty similar.  Besides, looks like he's been refining this for quite some time while I waited for the next DSL iso to show up at the DSL website.

Old hive, new hive

My large healthy Russian hybrid hive that wintered well then went queenless did not make it - sort of.  Let me explain.  After the "shaking" and new queen didn't take, I tried one more queen.  It still didn't make it.  However, the Italian hive completely filled the first brood chamber shortly there after WITHOUT HAVING RAISED ANY BROOD.  Obviously, the left over workers moved into the new hive instead.  I'm already on my 3rd hive body, getting ready to add a 4th!  They even went back and robbed ALL of the food stores from the old hive, cleaning it out completely. (I didn't really know what else to do with it, it was mostly tracked up brood chambers and I didn't want the honey myself).  So, next year, I guess I'll be buying another package or two.  I'd like to get 3 hives going so some day I could repair my own problems by robbing a brood frame from one and giving to another.  Anyway, I'm hoping for a good honey season.  Looks like we're off to a good start.