Tiny Core Linux
tinycorelinux.net
tinycorelinux.net
Being able to run a complete distribution off a cheap 128MB CF card is a great thing, especially because the packaging process for TC is really simple - packages are simply squashfs files being mounted to / after booting.
Customization and deployment (editing some files and dd'ing the image to the disks) is also really simple. The package repository is a bit clunky and not as big as you'd get with a major distro, but that should not really be a deterrent (see above).
Keep up the great work!
The site is hard to read on mobile so maybe I missed something that explains the goals of the project more clearly.
| Our goal is the creation of a nomadic ultra small graphical desktop operating system capable of booting from cdrom, pendrive, or frugally from a hard drive. The desktop boots extremely fast and is able to support additional applications and hardware of the users choice. While Tiny Core always resides in ram, additional applications extensions can either reside in ram, mounted from a persistent storage device, or installed into a persistent storage device.
A few real-world applications:
* Embedded systems, with storage constraints
* Docker; specifically, minimalistic images: pre-compile your (eg. node.js) app, drop it on top of a Tiny Core kernel, results in ~50-80mb image sizes
* At scale, this might be useful for larger clusters; saving a couple of 100s mbs of RAM might be negligible for single servers, but can add up as cluster scales
Meaning it was not aimed at addressing anything other than a "can it be done" curiousness.
I do wonder what the wave of "one middleware to rule them all" thinking that is sweeping Linux userspace development will have on projects like this one.
Tiny Core is still a young project, but it is fortunate to attract some great people. Thanks again from the Tiny Core Team. Catch you in the forums!
dentonlt, 14 February 2009