Linux Mint Forums

Hi everyone, I was wondering if its possible for the Linux Mint developers to make a REALLY BASIC and small operating system, just for browsing the web and with Flash and Java enabled?(yes I already know about LXDE and FLUXBOX but you really can't call them "basic")

I know about LXDE, XFCE, and Fluxbox already but they ALL have .iso files that are over 600mb; this is a problem for laptops because they have significantly slower optical drives than do computers. Also, it takes a reaaaaly long time for those operating systems to load on a computer or laptop with 192mb ram and NO HARDDRIVE! For example, my Toshiba Satellite A100(garbage laptop..DO NOT BUY ANY TOSHIBAS! THEY BREAK IN 2 MONTHS!) has only 192mb ram(the other 64mb is used for ATI graphics), 1.7GHz Intel Celeron M processor, and NO HARDDRIVE; booting off a LXDE cd takes for everrrrr, like 1 and a half hours on my laptop!

So far i have tried just about ALL of the lightweight Linux champions; xPUD, SliTaz, Lubuntu, XFCE, FLUXBOX, DamnSmallLinux(DSL), Puppy Linux, Slax, but NONE of them can function properly on a computer without a harddrive!

xPud worked on my laptop, but using Firefox on a computer with 192mb ram made it crash, and the same thing with PuppyLinux; SliTaz was awesome! it worked verrryyy fast, but unfortunately I had to manually install Flash using "taz-pkg" (I like "apt-get" better), and when in the installation process, IT CRASHES; DSL might have been a good distro, but i never got to find out because the booting process left me with a blank screen with the terminal only, no GUI; Slax was also a really good distro(it even recognized my laptop's wi-fi with no sweat!), but the KDE environment made it heavyweight and so, whenever i would try to browse YouTube or any sites with video, it would always crash the browser.

What im asking here is that we really need an operating system just for browsing the web(with flash and java included by default, if possible). The distro should also be verrryyy small, meaning no larger than 150mb; it should have a verryyyyy lightweight graphical user interface[like fluxbox]; and ONLY include web browsing applications or chat applications; NO JUNKWARE and just the very minimum amount of ram usage possible without using any applications (meaning that ram usage should be less than or equal to 40mb when idle).

Thanks for listening; please comment on whether it is possible to make this Linux Mint distro.

sagirfahmid3 wrote:What im asking here is that we really need an operating system just for browsing the web(with flash and java included by default, if possible). The distro should also be verrryyy small, meaning no larger than 150mb; it should have a verryyyyy lightweight graphical user interface[like fluxbox]; and ONLY include web browsing applications or chat applications; NO JUNKWARE and just the very minimum amount of ram usage possible without using any applications (meaning that ram usage should be less than or equal to 40mb when idle).

Who is this "we" you are talking about? I think you are asking more of your computer then is reasonable. No Linux Distro is going to run amazingly fast if you use Firefox ... with Flash ... with Java ... and only have 196 MiB of RAM (and no harddisk, so no swap) -- and I don't see how Linux Mint could be slimmed down to fit the target you set, without a huge amount of work (rebuilding it from the base up).

Anyway, you should consider using a USB stick to boot from. This will be a lot faster than booting from CD. Some other minimalist Linux distros you might want to try instead: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Minimal_Linux_distros. But these might be too heavy, as OLPC hardware has more RAM than your machine, and can use swap.

The better way, though paved with learning, might be to use Arch Linux. There even is a guide on how to install minimal Arch Linux system onto a USB stick. After install you can expand the packages installed on your USB stick; so you can add only those packages you need. This is the way to keep the most minimal system, specific to your machine.

Try this:

http://www.browserlinux.com/version3.html

BrowserLinux (366 v2)
BrowserLinux is a fast and small (77 Mb!) Linux distribution for surfing the web.

Web-browser (Firefox 3.6.6 or Google Chrome)
Flash 10.1
PDF-reader
Music Player (Alsaplayer)
Asus Eee: wireless tested on EeePC 900 (see BrowserLinux on USB drive)

This one should be even faster:

Version: Google Chrome stable
This is the same as version 362 except that Firefox is replaced by Google Chrome and it has less drivers.
ISO Size: 78 Mb

hey thanks! lemme check this thing out soon as im done with my college homework lol =/

An Ubuntu base isn't gonna be ideal for that, I'd suggest looking at something very bare bones, like Arch or Debian as your start point. As for "the Mint developers", I seem to be a bit of a broken record on the issue of resource management. Mint has so many editions right now with so few people that the quality suffers in my opinion, the last thing we need is yet another edition to further dilute the product. There are already kiosk distros as far as I know, although I'd suspect they're light on the number of things they do, rather than focusing on running with so little RAM.

ThistleWeb wrote:An Ubuntu base isn't gonna be ideal for that, I'd suggest looking at something very bare bones, like Arch or Debian as your start point. As for "the Mint developers", I seem to be a bit of a broken record on the issue of resource management. Mint has so many editions right now with so few people that the quality suffers in my opinion, the last thing we need is yet another edition to further dilute the product. There are already kiosk distros as far as I know, although I'd suspect they're light on the number of things they do, rather than focusing on running with so little RAM.

Indeed, sir, i agree with you.

I listened to jazz.h and downloaded BrowserLinux and its working fine at the moment. It has flash included by default!