Joseph, You might try looking into Damn Small Linux (DSL) http://www.damnsmalllinux.org . This distro is <50MB desktop targeted. Debian based. The guys there claim they ran and browsed the web/played mp3s on 486DX parts with 16MB RAM. There are others. Just take a flip through distrowatch and see who report very small iso sizes. You might also try checking out some of the distro's listed under http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Distributions/ to see if they meet your requirements. Itmight help if you could put your reqs in a list and post them. I'm not sure which thing you are looking for more importantly than others. -Mike
---------------------------------------
Mike Cherba
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of T. Joseph CARTER
Sent: Thu 4/28/2005 5:02 AM
To: Eugene Unix and Gnu/Linux User Group
Subject: Re: [Eug-lug] New kernel 2.6.12 going to be out soon
On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 06:21:42PM -0500, timothy wrote:
> Looks like Branden Robinson the newly elected Debian Project Leader is doing
> something. I don't remember a Project Leader being as quoted as him.
If I know Branden, I can't even imagine what the quotes say. ;)
You know, back in the day, I designed and implemented most of a Linux
installer based on a prerelease of Debian woody. I say most because at
one point it did this:
Please partition your discs and mount them under /target. Installation
will continue when you exit this terminal. If you need to reboot for
your changes to take effect, use the 'reboot' command.
installer:/# _
Conveniently I found one of my old CDs. One of these centuries when I no
longer have class on Thursday nights I could deliver it to a euglug
meeting if someone really wants to see it up close.. =) Anyway, once you
have your discs partitioned and mounted, you would get this (keep in mind
we're talking about daze long past now..):
Choose an installation profile:
1) Desktop (Gnome)
A complete system for desktop (client or peer) operation utilizing
the latest versions of Gnome [then 1.4], Netscape, and Mozilla,
lightweight daemons, and no public services by default.
2) Server
A text-only system intended for console or remote access. Provides
conservative default configurations for each service installed,
using popular and flexible servers such as Apache and Postfix.
3) Power-user/development
A hybrid profile based on both of the above with a basic C/C++
development environment. Good if you know what you're doing.
4) Minimal/custom
The basic components and nothing more. No services at all beyond
basic networking, in just 18 MB for an IDE system.
The default choice was 1. If you chose that option and did not have any
ISA cards and the right setup, you could have your system running with
only 7 questions to answer: use the default LAN settings, use that video
mode, yes X11 works with these settings, root PW, user/name/PW. There's a
little more if something doesn't autodetect, you want to use a modem, you
have ISA, etc.
All profiles except minimal would unpack a support tarball containing
ssmtp, a caching DNS, and a modified version of thttpd, all set up to run
on localhost. Also included but not enabled by default were CUPS, samba,
and nfs stuff. A text-based widget would let you enable and control the
supported services, though I wanted to make a GUI version of this to
include with X tarball. I also stuck cron, logrotate, a replacement
syslog config that was meant to handle log rotation, anacron, vim-support,
nano, jed, wget, and lftp in here.
The X tarball was just X. You got it with the desktop and power-user
environments. Acknowledgement of bloat: X tarball included wmaker because
I used wmaker and wanted something other than twm for the devel system.
The server would present you a list of things like "Mail server (Postfix)"
and "Web server (Apache)". Since the support tarball literally contained
preinstalled versions of packages (there was some trickery to tell dpkg
that the packages were installed that fits the cheap hack category, but
this was meant to be functional more than Right(TM), after all!), the
little mini-service packages would simply be removed in favour of their
bigger cousins. Note, because this was an add-on for Debian, the cousins
had companion packages which interfaced to the network service widget so
that postfix, CUPS, apache, ntpd, etc could be made public and have other
extremely basic configuration done.
The power-user setup gave you the same menu as the server profile with the
added option to include the Gnome desktop. Added question if you install
it here: Start up with graphical login? Other than that, it installed the
support tarball, whatever parts of the server profile you wanted (removing
the parts of the support tarball you replaced), the X tarball, and the
Gnome desktop if you wanted it (added question: use startx or gdm?).
Minimal didn't include even the support tarball. You had a stripped down
Debian base system, though, with vim (no vim-support), lynx (custom config
to use advanced mode and go to localhost by default), and the basic netkit
clients. You get syslog with a config designed not to fill your disc with
crap until you install things like some mail handler, cron, etc. It's
just enough to go and get more stuff--it isn't meant for embedded systems
or anything.
Larry says he has a FreeBSD like that, but does anyone know of a Linux
which is reasonably sane and works on this principle of giving you a
reasonable set of stuff to do what you need without filling your disc full
of crap to wade through? I think my key "innovations" here were that in
all but the minimal setup, there were daemons you could expect to have
working, including a webserver for system docs and access other users'
public files (on localhost only, unless configured otherwise) and making
the obvious choices the defaults without limiting you to those defaults.
For example, if you wanted exim instead of postfix, you could install
exim. You would have to get exim from Debian and uninstall postfix and
postfix-kdist to do it, which means you'd lose the little checkbox to
control whether or not it listens to public port 25 and set up whether it
delivers mail itself or where it passes the mail on to. Of course you
could write exim-kdist to add this functionality back, but I didn't
because I didn't need to. At the time, Debian wasn't interested in this
idea--they'd already decided that udebs were the future, and it wasn't
terribly long after that I kinda lost motivation to work on Debian.
If I were to try to recreate the distribution I made out of Woody, today I
would probably choose XFCE as my desktop instead of Gnome (I know Gnome is
better--in fact, with a few patches to Metacity that Havoc wouldn't accept
upstream, I'd call it perfect! But it's also big and needs a 1GHz system
with 128MB or more to not run so slowly you want to strangle yourself..
XFCE runs great in less on slower.) I would also make some different
choices in a few places, bite the bullet and include a portion of the GNU
emacs stuff, zeroconf, forgo thttpd for apache, that sort of thing. I
would probably also not try to use Debian.
Also, my little setup involved hacking dpkg's status file to register the
tarball's packages as installed in evil ways, and I had to add a lot of
cruft on top of Debian to make it clean. Better would be to build it
clean, and while you could do that following the Ubuntu model, it'd be
better not to try that. It would be better I think to take lessons from
fink, which has essentially taken Debian's binary package system and
meshed it with source packages ala Gentoo. It may not be wise to use dpkg
in its unmodified state, but I am not sure that any of the options of
modifying it, using another package manager, or coming up with something
new are any better. Binary packages would be needed for KDE and Gnome,
but most other things could be source packages as fink does now.
Of course, the most obvious thing to note (and I should have noted it long
before now) is that I don't have time to do this. I do run Linux on one
of my machines, but it's not my main machine. In fact, I haven't even had
the time needed to turn it into the server it is meant to be. I'd like to
see a "sane" Linux that does something like this, but I don't really have
the free time or the motivation to do anything about it, especially given
that it would be YALD from scratch with security and maintenance issues.
Still, the results would be sane, and would even run on a machine almost
as old as Neil's without problems. =)
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