I have been trying for several days to build a LiveCD with the DSL (Damn Small Linux) ISO without any luck.

According to what I was told, simply download dsl-1.5.iso, and burn it to a CD, and it will work.

Well, I've tried it 3 different times, and all I got is 3 unuseable CDs.

All they have in the root directory is an INDEX.HTML file and 3 directories:

(1) boot, with subdirectory isolinux, with the following files: boot.cat, boot.msg, f2, f3, german.kbd, isolinux.bin, isolinux.cfg, linux24, logo.16, and minirt24.gz

(2) KNOPPIX, with the file KNOPPIX

(3) lost+found

And even as much a noob as I am, I know there has to be more in the root directory to make it work.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks...

I'm going to refer you to the DSL wiki page, that describes what to do. The link is here.

But, let me make a few comments.

1. Did you burn the cd as an image, not a data file?

2. Did you burn the image at 8X or slower?

3. Is the bios set for the cdrom drive to be the first boot option?

4. Are you using a cdrw disk or cd-r disk of good quality?

5. Are you using the same cdrw drive to boot the cd, or an older cdrom drive?

6. Are you using dial-up to download the image and did you check the md5sum of the iso file after you downloaded it to make sure that the image was valid?

DSL is a very small distro. The file structure seems fine, from what you described, so it looks like you burned the image correctly. Don't expect that you should see more files on the cd than you do. DSL is built on a small platform.

Take a look at my how-to about burning iso images here