Minimal Linux Live: a minimalistic distro with basic network support via DHCP | Hacker News Reader

Minimal Linux Live: a minimalistic distro with basic network support via DHCP

minimal.linux-bg.org

73 pointsvmorgulis34 comments

The answer to the question that's probably on everyone's mind: the resulting image is 12MiB for the x64 version and 11MiB for the x86 version.

By comparison, 16 MiB buys you a full-fledged (windowed) Linux live CD: http://tinycorelinux.net/ (or you can use their 11MiB kernel-only environment).

Seems equivalent. The 16MB TinyCore is the x86 version, whereas the x86-64 port takes 25MB.

OpenWrt 3MB

The x86 version seems to be 6MB.

Anyone remember Tom's Rescue Disk? This linux-on-a-floppy was a must-have for rescue and recover back in the day... The web site lives on, but many of the links are 404'd

http://www.toms.net/rb/

It's not Linux, but QNX's demo floppy packed a ton on a single disk. Network drivers, web browser, VESA 2.0 video drivers, a few apps...

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

QNX was ahead of its time. I think it underpinned most versions of the BlackBerry OS and is used in cars / infotainment systems, but I think they would have made a killing in the IoT space if they had developed in another era.

QNX was only used in BB10, which was only introduced after the fall of BlackBerry's popularity (and, arguably, was part of the reason for their old products stagnating)

From that era, I also remember muLinux, which packed quite a lot onto some superformatted floppies.

http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/

This comment made me smile - growing up in west Africa this was my first Linux - its modular nature let me download a floppy disk's worth of sub system every week, using the 1 to 2 hours of Internet access that I got for the week, slowly building up from scripting languages all the way up to X11. Fun times :)

In case anyone still wants it, I had the latest version backed up: http://www.filedropper.com/tomsrtbt-20103tar

This is awesome, thanks for sharing.

The full build process is documented [1,2], and the sources are very readable and well-commented.

Also appears to include a basic install-to-disk script, which from the looks of it you definitely should not try unless you know how to fix your MBR after it overwrites whatever you've currently got in place.[3]

Github: https://github.com/ivandavidov/minimal

[1] http://blog.idzona.com/2016/04/component-architecture-of-min...

[2] https://github.com/ivandavidov/minimal/blob/master/src/the_d...

[3] https://github.com/ivandavidov/minimal/blob/master/src/overl...

Good job. I'm personally a big fan of the alpine distro.

I just wish there were an Alpine variant with native glibc support.

It would hardly be Alpine, and it would be much bigger, its very hard to make a small glibc.

A great deal of the cruft in modern distros comes from docs, example configs, etc -- things Alpine does a great job of cutting out. Obviously a glibc variant is going to have a much larger memory footprint, and (arguably) is less secure than an musl libc distro, but it gains the ability to run glibc-only software (cough Oracle Java cough) without having to ship around container/host images with all the extra junk deb packages bring along for the ride.

I may be misunderstanding the problem but wouldn't it be possible to package up the bare minimum for running the JRE?

The glibc runtime required files is about 4MB total (uncompressed): libc, libm, libdl, ld.so (the runtime linker), libnss*, libcrypt, libidn, libpthread, librt, libresolv, and a few others.

The gcc runtime files by comparison are 12MB total (uncompressed): libstdc++ (7MB), libgcc_s (0.5MB), libasan (optional; 4.5MB).

This is pretty cool. Had one minor script glitch (the scripts do not defend against having './' in $PATH, so picked up wrong cpio at one point) but built up pretty much straight-away.

I then spent a few minutes adding Micropython to the image, so now I have a 12MiB image that includes a pretty nice and very compact Python, although I haven't added my favorite uPython libraries yet.

Can I build this for a floppy? I've got an old machine I want to install into.

This seems to be maintained, and directly supports floppies: http://www.giannone.ch/rescue/current/

Look for an older archive for a distribution like slackware. Your hardware should be more supported

The machine is an i486, it's not "that" old so I'd like to get it running with debian or preferably arch. If I can get something to bootstrap the network ISA card I've got in there and allow me to build a linux environment I can bootstrap the other OS over a small one (like this).

Try debian woody or slackware 10, both are from around 2004 and should run on 16Mb of RAM or less

There's also Damn Small Linux which is based on debian woody, you could install dos, then transfer DSL image using a null-modem cable and loadlin to disk and use that to bootstrap it from DOS

I'm on DOS 6.22, a 200MB HDD, 4 COM, 1 Parallel, and I've got a shit load of floppy disks. What I don't have is drivers for my network card.

How would I go about bootstrapping DSL? What is a null-modem cable?

PS: I've also got a zip program and a C compiler on there. If I need to write software to make this happen I have the power to do so.

Arch requires full i686; there used to be an Arch-derivative called ConnochaetOS that only required i586, but it discontinued (then came back later as a Slackware-derivative).

Projects like this is one of the things that make Linux the single most important, first-grade in its universal usefullness, operating system.

Another similar cool multi-platform project that has been around for a while is Aboriginal Linux.

This is awesome! I'm going to try this to cross-compile for ARM, so MLL might be the embedded linux 'boilerplate' which I need.

You may be better off using Yocto[1], which is a custom distortion builder for small-space use cases. It's an official Linux Foundation project as well.

[1] https://www.yoctoproject.org

Has anyone used both Yocto and Buildroot? How do they compare?

Have used Yocto and Buildroot for Freescale board's official images. Cannot recommend buildroot.

Buildroot is a poor build system. Perhaps make has spoiled me, but I expect anything that calls itself a build system to be able to find on its own what needs to be rebuilt. With buildroot, when I changed a component, I either had to explicitly ask for it to be rebuilt (and the explicitly ask the final image to be rebuilt), or explicitly mark the component dirty. The problem with the latter being that it's a one-way action; there's no way to clear the dirty flag without a full clean and rebuild of that component. Made our custom kernel dev work painfully slow.

Yocto was simple enough to read about and understand the setup.

What are the usecases envisioned for this distro?

> All you get is a simple shell console which supports all BusyBox applets and... well, that's all. This is why it's called "minimal".

> The good news is that the build scripts are very small in size and simple to understand. You can easily learn from the scripts and later modify them to include more stuff (I encourage you to do so). After you learn the basics you will have all the necessary tools and skills to create your own fully functional Linux based operating system. Entirely from scratch!

Build your own lightweight linux-based systems and utilities, I guess. And learn while doing.

I've tried and it works perfectly;

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