Tiny interesting distros

[vrkalak]

I'm always on the look out for small to medium-small Linux distros for my 'old' laptop. I recently, downloaded 2 more, that I had not previously tried:

I downloaded and tried out MacPup . . . it's nice and light-weight and it comes with the e17 Enlightenment desktop. A great dual-themed looking desktop.

Also, just downloaded, but have not yet tried, Nimble-X. A nice looking light-weight OS. The ISO files are only 100 Mb.

[timber]

Nimble-X sure does have a cool "Custom ISO builder" ... never seen that approach before for a distro.
Think I'll give it a test run myself.

[groovydaddy]

As far as mini-distro's go, here are my fav's:

antiX - http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
Puppy - http://puppylinux.com
Unity Linux - http://unity-linux.org
TinyMe Linux - http://tinymelinux.com/
Debian - http://www.debian.org

That's right, Debian! With a net-install ISO disk, you can install the bare bones on an older computer, and add packages as needed to get all your hardware working and desired applications. I've used Debian a few times on client's older computers to get them up and running again.

I personally don't like Fluxbox too much, so I haven't used Mint Fluxbox on any older PC's. Although I'm sure it would work well.

[Imhoteps]

This 1 might be interesting for every1 who likes Enlightenment - http://www.bodhilinux.com/ .
Bodhi seems to be 1 of the closest to *buntu-based distros, as I`ve read somewhere...
Pretty cute and neat LiveCD distro.

[Nick_Djinn]

If I made my own distro, like arch, it would end up heavier than Ubuntu.

[mikhou]

I'd have to go with Puppy and MacPup. I'm not a big fan of Enlightenment, but MacPup's not bad. I also agree with another poster who said to just go with straight-up Debian. Just don't go crazy installing a bunch of extra stuff, and it's plenty light.

mikhou

[nunol]

I also agree with another poster who said to just go with straight-up Debian. Just don't go crazy installing a bunch of extra stuff, and it's plenty light.

Couldn't agree more, chose your Debian from:
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/
And from a 386 with 4MB to a recent computer you have a nice OS. If you don't have a 386 with 4MB or better just go with FreeDOS.

[Nick_Djinn]

Mint tools makes Debian a little more palatable, though not necessarily easier to install.....not that its that hard, but there are a few rules I wasnt aware of that I didnt used to worry about.


I would like to see Mint do what Ubuntu did with their fork of Debian, adding some of Ubuntus tools, but doing it more intelligently with their own style and keeping it geared for the end user experience.

I almost think they should do what puredyne did and go with the low latency kernel, but thats another discussion.

[mikhou]

Keep in mind that the OP was about tiny distros. Once you start adding Mint tools to Debian, it's no longer a tiny distro. It's a full-sized user-friendly desktop or notebook distro. Also, Debian is not difficult to install if you're willing to learn a bit. Now please don't hear me being Linux-high-and-mighty. That's not it. But for a year after I first moved to Linux, all I read was how hard Debian was to install. Then when I decided to actually do it, I found out that it's not any harder than any other Linux distro, and it's incredibly fast and stable.

I would bet (and this is not pointed at Nick above who sounds like he has done it before) that most people who talk about Debian being difficult to install and/or setup have never tried it. They've just heard the Debian reputation for being difficult. Granted, it might be slightly more difficult than Mint, but it's not so difficult that somebody with a modicum of computer knowledge couldnt' do it.

Just my $.02.

mikhou

[Nick_Djinn]

Ive tried it. I was able to do it, but I dont know that just any reasonably intelligent person would necessarily 'get it' just by following the directions on the install disk, following the prompts and options.....No, its not rocket science or even algebra, but it requires a bit of preliminary reading to know what the different partitions are and which ones are necessary and how much to devote to each.....With the Ubuntu installer there are super easy options like "Erase and use entire disk", but then there are other good options like "use largest continuous free space", and "install side by side with other operating system" and you just drag and drop the amount of space you want to devote.....Honestly I like the OLD Ubuntu installer better than the new one, but prefer both to Debians installer.

I dont really care about the size of the ISO or keeping that small.....Honestly, if we are using DVDs anyway, I dont see why we are not fully utilizing them and including the entire 4gb+ as a resource for people without high speed internet (at least as a torrent version if you dont want to dedicate the bandwidth). What I do care about is unnecessary libraries that slow down performance in vivo.

It might be more work, but what if there was an app that could detect your hardware and shed unnecessary crap on the kernel level if you dont really need all that extra support on the PC you are actually using? It would be more work, but there might be some performance gains.


Sorry if I got off topic though.


Back to tiny distros, anyone ever get a tiny distro working on a smartphone? Anyone ever dual boot Android/Windows mobile and a tiny distro of Linux?

[spider2097]

A small distro I'm finding quite interesting is SliTaz :

http://www.slitaz.org/en/

The ISO weighs in at 30Mb & it seems quite well featured.

Note, this has been discussed recently in the following topic : viewtopic.php?f=58&t=71597

Gonna have to get myself one of those Linux Bible thingies and look at how to customize distro's as I'd like to see what sort of difference adding Mint Tools and a few other things to it (SliTaz) would do. At the moment I'm not really too much of a code tinkerer so that's something I'm reading up on (how easy, how to find out "weighty" the Mint tools are etc).

[hinto]

I've booted (and ran) Puppy on a Pentium MMX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_MMX#MMX (for the young guys)
-H

[dimechin]

The plethora of Linux distributions available, has seen much of the day, whose stated goal is to give you the most of Linux in the small amount of space. They run in low memory, requires very little disk space to install, and at the same time, is immediately useful and powerful: you can start to work immediately and within seconds, not minutes or hours.

[sagirfahmid3]

I've personally used these small distros (ranking from good to not-that-good:
1. SliTaz
2. xPUD
3. Puppy Linux
4. Browser Linux, which is based on Puppy (http://www.browserlinux.com/)
I wanna see more of SliTaz, but they've been having some problems with their main site (www.slitaz.org)
SliTaz boots up in 30-40 seconds on an old AMD Duron 900MHz, 168MB RAM!

[minitrucker]

kinda surprised that #!crunchbang has yet to be mentioned. i usually run about 105Mb ram after a completed startup which includes guake in the startup script. once dropbox kicks in it might hit about 120Mb. as far as browsing, if i stick to w3m then i never even reach 200Mb. all this on a machine with 4Gb ram....

[sagirfahmid3]

Crunchbang isn't tiny; it has a large .iso size, takes up a DVD, so it's not tiny.

Look at SliTaz--30MB iso
Look at Tiny Core Linux--12MB iso
Look at Puppy Linux--150MB iso

THOSE can be called tiny distributions--both in size, and in RAM usage.

[minitrucker]

it had been a long time since i paid attention to iso size of #! ill admit... i will say i have puppy on my zombie project which has an AMD k6>>>the comp istelf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Presario_1200 and the processor it has in more detail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K6. And it respectively quick....that is to say much quicker than win98 was....

[baptiste]

I love PLD Rescue, for any quick task where I need a text mode linux that runs anywhere. (even can boot from network)
once booted you're logged on as root on six tty, and you have access to lots of various disk and network tools (including the obvious ones : ssh, scp, fdisk, sshfs, dd, dd_rescue etc.)

PLD is also its own distro, which claims to be simple (the distro itself, not thg' ease of use) but I didn't run it. you have an i486 and an i686 version for instance.


else I do mostly debian and ubuntu. ubuntu can be used in the same exact way as debian, i.e. installing it text mode and adding a few packages. can fit on a 96MB computer if you're going to run abiword and card games and the like. (or even vlc and music player)

interesting is the dillo browser, I ran it many years ago when it was 1.x version, it has few features but is insanely fast.
for a while it was marred in a 2.x version running on an experimental toolkit (fltk 2.0) so it wasn't published in distros, but lately there's the 3.x version running on the new fltk 1.3, I hope it's in ubuntu 12.04 and debian 7 (dunno), will get in newer versions of tiny distros no doubt.

[Monsta]

I think Alpine Linux deserves to be mentioned here.

A small distro based on uClibc and BusyBox, with its own package management system and repositories.
It's intended to be an embedded OS. It can be run entirely in RAM and has a special "configuration framework" with web interface, but it's not a problem to install it to the hard disk and set up a desktop environment. It does not come with any DE by default, but Gnome 2.32, XFCE 4.8, Openbox 3.5.0 and Fluxbox 1.3.2 are available from the repositories. No LXDE though - I don't know why.
Default DE-less installation weighs less than 200 mb and boots in 4-5 seconds.

More info:
on the official website
in wikipedia

[minitrucker]

running and talking about puppy got me thinkin about checking out slackware itself.... Slackware 13.37 .iso is even bigger than #! the torrent im DLing is 4.3Gib. not what i expected.