Show HN: Monolinux – A tiny embedded Linux distro | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Monolinux – A tiny embedded Linux distro

github.com

69 pointseerimoq17 comments

As it is 'tiny' I think people expect some kind of size indication?

The size depends on your Linux kernel configuration and user space application. My guess is that most distros will be a 5+ MB.

The readme isn't really up to date, but many years ago I started minifs to be the smallest, reproducible linux distro I can get away with. With extra tools like a 'cross linker' that removes /anything/ that isn't used on a filesystem before packing it.

It's mostly bash. And a bit of C for tools. Works on ARM, whatever really, as long as there is a kernel and a toolchain.

https://github.com/buserror/minifs

I miss the days of running Linux from a single floppy with a complete development environment.

When was that? I started using Linux in mid 90's and never recall a useful installation of that size. Single floppy rescue disc distros did not have room for C compiler and standard development libs IIRC.

MuLinux could boot a Linux to a prompt, with minimal command line utilities. Extra floppies provided X11, GCC, Tcl, Perl, et. al. MuLinux formatted 3.5" floppies to 1.7mb and replaced many utilities with "rustic" versions written in /bin/sh. Fun stuff! Disclosure: I contributed the Tcl floppy and lpr/lpq/lprm utilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux

What makes this different than Alpine?

In Monolinux there is a single statically linked user space application (the init-process). Alpine has the traditional approach of many user space applications and shared libraries, if I'm not mistaken.

Cool. ARM?

I'd love for this to be the case. I have a handful of raspberry pi projects that I just want to boot and run a single executable. I don't need or want the rest of the OS included with the likes of raspbian etc. I'm currently working on a dietpi customization but this would be even better if it worked.

Have you tried ArchARM? It's pretty lean and fits into those old 512M SD Cards.

If you have a 512mb SD card, you should probably not use it anymore. Even if you don't need the storage.

I use a 64 mb CF card for photos

I haven't heard of that one (I did check out a version of puppy and tiny core). I'll check it out, thanks!

There's also Buildroot which has a bit of a learning curve (it's still easier than Yocto/Angstrom IMO) but is capable of producing highly customized, tiny embedded Linux images. At this time, there are board configs for pretty much every Rasperry Pi variant out there.

The functional equivalent of a Debian base install, including kernel, bootloader, and systemd init (approx. 350 MiB) is about 20 MiB (compressed) when built with Buildroot.

Build a static binary (with musl perhaps) and put it in an initramfs at /init. An example https://github.com/mkj/rpi-flipflop/blob/main/Makefile#L9

ARM is the only architecture I've used so far. =)

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