Slitaz, A 50MB Lightweight Desktop Operating System | Hacker News Reader

Slitaz, A 50MB Lightweight Desktop Operating System

ubuntubuzz.com

123 pointsmiles84 comments

>It can run on a quarter of a GB memory. Its installation image is only fifty megabytes, full desktop included,

Oh, how the times change. I remember when "lightweight Linux" meant it came on a single 1.4MB floppy disk and could run on 4MB of RAM. Yes, including desktop, though that may have required a second floppy and 8MB.

These days, locale alone takes up 100MB of disk space, in case of Debian. Even without it, it's still difficult to go below 50MB, IIRC. Welp, even USB thumb drivers are much larger than that, so it won't be a problem, practically, but it's kinda puzzling to see how things can get this big.

> but it's kinda puzzling to see how things can get this big.

the industry has been on moore's drug for too long and reckless software develpement practices really take their toll since the performance plateau came in effect around 2015.

Well, that, and we have much better locale support.

Also people expect a lot of quality of life stuff like unicode instead of ASCII, larger resolution images, more hardware support etc.

true :)

I use to enjoy the blog of Virtual Dub, the author made this tiny video editor and talked frequently how things could be optimized without library dependencies. https://www.virtualdub.org/blog2/archive.html

Adding a huge library dependency to only use a function or two from there feels like a common practice these days, unfortunately. More often than not, you can copy the interesting part into your project as sources, or even better, reimplement it in a way that's more specific, and thus more optimal, for your problem.

My first Linux install was in 1995 or 1996 with kernel 1.2.x and a functional desktop required way much more than a single floppy disk. IIRC, the kernel alone (with initrd) was taking one disk. I'm curious when "lightweight Linux" fit on one or two disks.

It's not quite one or two floppies, but today you can get a full Linux desktop in 12MB via Tiny Core Linux.

http://www.tinycorelinux.net

ASMUTILS were specifically made for this. All your typical unix command line applications implemented in x86 assembly. You can still download the floppy image here: http://asm.sourceforge.net/asmutils.html

My memory is a bit hazy, but it was actually later than that, 1999 or 2000, playing around with an old Toshiba laptop. It was a specialized distro of course, there were (and still are) a few of those. Maybe tomsrtbt. And a the desktop was functional inasmuch you could have multiple xterm windows and little else.

Heh, well, not sure about this, as it was the famous QNX 4.x floppy which was groundbreaking (the main dev passed away around the time of the release). I remember running a Linux firewall on a floppy, stateless (read-only). Nowadays, we wouldn't accept such, as it would not be able to update the software easily. I mean, one can run a firewall and virtual switch in a VM these days. With snapshot support. And then there's something like Nix which does take up a lot of space, same with ZFS dedup. While these features all use a lot of disk space, they give a lot of advantages. Which, logically, come with a price.

Do you have numbers for Nix? I would expect one can put together a fairly small system by specifying only what is needed

I think you’re rather over exaggerating. For a few emergency boot disk or very low spec, like LOAF or uLinux, sure. But even late 90s, for anything actually practical, 50mb would’ve been quite the achievement. DragonLinux was my go to “lightweight” and it was around 200mb. 50mb in the early 00s only got you the net install for Debian, and Knoppix was a whole CD.

But this is 2021. You need to do some serious pruning just to get GCC in under 1gb. 50 mb is a fucking miracle.

I remember installing Slackware along with the desktop environment a long time ago (probably 25 years) and it was a pile of floppies...

I really wish new GNU/Linux distribution were titled as such:

Discover Slitaz, An extremely light weight GNU/Linux distro

Discover GNU/Linux Slitaz, An extremely light distro

Something like that. You can drop the GNU part if that is not your thing.

I am always elated to learn about new operating systems. I am always disappointed when it tuns out to be yet another distro.

Now this one looks interesting and I will play with it in a VM. I just get my expectations get high when it says new operating system

+1. IMO the term "operating system" should be reserved for significantly original kernel/userland code.

technical terminology has been pretty largely devalued across the board. do you remember what 'implement an SMTP server' used to mean? so fine, words change, but now there is no way to refer to actually writing the source for a compliant MTA.

distributed systems developer? senior software engineer? bare metal?

Not everyone is a Linus Torvalds or Terry Davis

(say what you will about TempleOS, what he managed to build alone was awesome)

Yes.

I am a great admirer of his.

Had the world been a more tolerant, supportive, and friendly place I wonder what he would have achieved.

Just for him to have an easier life would have been enough though.

What Terry Davis did wasn't just writing an OS, but also developed his own C dialect and the compiler (HolyC).

In a way, I think that guy was even a greater genius than Linus.

>You can drop the GNU part if that is not your thing.

Really? Then one should also drop everything it represents including gcc ...

>I really wish new GNU/Linux distribution were titled as such:

Here I would agree.

herpaderp

looks like an interesting project. Is anyone using this in 2021? I noticed the last blog post from the official site was in 2017. The forum is also very quiet.

What would prevent me from touching this however: ISO images are hosted via plain HTTP[1] and the only way to verify it is an md5sum that I have to fetch from the same domain. not only is there no transport integrity but I have no way of knowing if the binaries hosted on that server can be traced to a build upstream? Maybe I have to dig around their hg to find out or I'm missing something? Who built these images and where would be good to know before I would consider loading any of this on my hardware.

I could not make sense of the info in this page[2] linked to from [download] warning about spectre/meltdown. Also the suggested mitigation techniques were odd to say the least.

The project had a total of 7 contributors since 2012. Would be nice if this got more eyeballs and some serious refactoring on how they do security and build automation since this is a key element in a distribution (imho).

[1] http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/rolling/slitaz-rolling.iso

[2] https://forum.slitaz.org/topic/-important-info-about-meltdow...

About 10 years ago, I used VMs of Slittaz when making virtual networks for school and needed multiple hosts. It was a great option for that. I will likely have to do something similar soon and Slittaz seems like a good candidate.

Alpine might be a better choice for you, its intended use is in VMs and containers, it's actively maintained and supported, and it gets better with each release.

https://alpinelinux.org

Here is my minimalist Alpine Linux daily driver desktop.

https://lamda-chops.bearblog.dev/alpine-linux/

Nice setup, thanks! Just to note, the network-manager-* packages are now networkmanager-*, and the xf86-input-keyboard and xf86-input-mouse are no longer available (nor needed, I believe). Also, I see packages in your list for running under virtualization, so I'm assuming you aren't running your desktop on bare metal? I actually did a quick install using your guide on a spare machine just now, and it worked great apart from the above changes. Very nimble and usable on an old HP Stream Mini desktop with 4GB of RAM.

Thanks so much for the feedback, and I'm glad it is working for you. Yes, I was using this in VirtualBox. I now use it on bare metal, so I may show how that differentiation is made. I made the updates to the blog post.

Thank you! I very much appreciate that.

Here's a few other distros that i enjoy and that are on the lighter side, even though they're larger than Slitaz.

Personally, i'd look at the usability of a distro first and then the file size, which seems to work out nicely for me with the below distros, since their desktops (e.g. LXDE/LXQt, XFCE) are fully featured and there's a sufficient amount of software for them to be daily drivers.

Puppy Linux: https://puppylinux.com/

Lubuntu: https://lubuntu.net/ (uBlock now seemed to warn me about adware, not sure what's going on)

Xubuntu: https://xubuntu.org/

> (uBlock now seemed to warn me about adware, not sure what's going on)

The real Lubuntu website is https://lubuntu.me/ (it's linked from https://ubuntu.com/download/flavours)

Thanks for catching that! It's pretty disheartening to see people doing something like creating a shady site that pretends to be the real thing.

Thankfully uBlock at least warned me about something being off, though having some sort of a reputation plugin for webpages would be nice too, with more details about what exactly is going on.

Great suggestions. Personally I'd put LXLE in the mix here as well: https://lxle.net/

My understanding is they started as a fork of lubuntu when the latter moved to LXQt and changed focus away from older systems.

I really have no idea where .net came from, the latest on that site is 19.04 and I would stay away. lubuntu.me is the real address.

Glad to see Slitaz still alive and going well. I first used it probably in 2010, and I really liked how different it was from other distros at the time.

I was kinda surprised to see that the development repos are hosted using mercurial (https://hg.slitaz.org/). I don't remember seeing other Linux distros using mercurial instead of git for development. The repos are apparently mirrored on GitHub but I don't see a lot of development happening there.

The download button on the front page is broken on Brave browser.

> Mixed Content: The site at 'https://www.slitaz.org/' was loaded over a secure connection, but the file at 'http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/rolling/slitaz-rolling-core64.i...' was loaded over an insecure connection. This file should be served over HTTPS. This download has been blocked. See https://blog.chromium.org/2020/02/protecting-users-from-inse... for more details.

That looks like an error from your browser, rather than a broken link.

Their download server supports HTTPS for what it's worth, you just need a decent browser that will either try HTTPS automatically or allow you to download files over HTTP.

No it's a valid error. It means you were trying to download a HTTP file while on a HTTPS site, which is why you got that mixed content warning.

And brave is a "decent browser"?

I want to try this for my DellMini9 machine, no SSD, would boot from USB.

Only need to run it latest FireFox and Terminal + Vi editor.

Is it possible?

For that use case, I think one of the puppy linux flavors would work well. Some even have ubuntu package support: https://puppylinux.com/

I ran it from USB on a very old Acer 2310 with a Celeron (old series, not new) M processor and 256MB RAM. Worked fine. I didn't try latest Firefox on it but the included web browser was alright. Terminal and vi worked.

Thanks, will give it a try

The article linked says Firefox is not available in there, not in the live image nor its package repository.

It used to be under 40MB on their first releases. I had it on a USB drive to boot old machines and worked great.

Once I saw the spider logo feature I was sold

Web based installer? Yikes. I'm gonna have to try this!

> and Faenza as its icon theme

Faenza is/was the omega of icons. In an alternate timeline it rightfully became the only icons theme everyone need.

The thing with Faenza was the same reason it became popular - the uniformity of their outer shapes. Some people didn't liked them because it was hard for them to tell icons apart.

I once worked with the KDE VDG on what they would do about the default icon theme for their (then future) Frameworks 5.0 release, and suggested several icons going in that trend (which was originated in the rage of those days of skeumorphism on smartphones and Apple icons for iOS) - but was told that - and that they needed to use the original icons for several apps, like Firefox, so no custom versions would be appropriate - no "adaptation" to outer squared shapes were possible

I remember having a CD of this a long time ago. I wanted to use it on my old ThinkPads but I could never get it to boot.

While I love the concept, the fact the package manager is different from the common ones, and some of the packages they do have are outdated, means attempting to use this for my use case will probably result in a painful experience.

I remember when the internet was smaller (20 years ago?) some people would have a comparison of different package managers for linux distros where they would dive in to examples and use. Anyway, this is a high level of package currency : https://repology.org/

The last distros I've used that didn't really have their own package managers were Slackware (it is just a tarball) and PuppyLinux (adopted from slackware or debian).

Anyway, Slitaz is here https://repology.org/repository/slitaz_cooking

Meh, I'm using Ubuntu 14.x (LXDE) today and it's quite usable.

I don't think outdated packages are that big of a deal, as long as they work in the first place.

I can't access some websites like Twitter, Reddit, and Slack, but I consider that to be an advantage.

As long as the distro has enough manpower to ensure that outdated packages are not a security risk. I run Debian stable because I don't mind old versions, and I trust the Debian people to keep my system reasonably secure.

If I'm behind NAT and only browsing a handful of trustworthy websites, where does the security risk come from?

May I suggest joining Ubuntu Advantage and getting ESM? That's free for personal use and you'd get support until April 2024. I'm keeping a 16.04 box like that simply because I'm too lazy to redo stuff that works and with that I don't have to worry about it until 2026.

It's my only working machine right now, and I'm not going to risk an OS change.

It came with this one installed, and I'm gonna let it stay for the time being.

Also, the installed browsers are already a bit on the slow side, and I can imagine they would only get slower if I upgraded them.

How many third party domains do the trustworthy websites connect to?

Generally speaking, none.

I verify this in the Network Monitor pane.

Otherwise, I do not consider them trustworthy.

Nice, then you're in a very low risk group.

Agreed, but the article says some do not: "However, available applications as mentioned are limited for now, in number and in version and in ability to run, as there are many outdated applications will not work after installation"

It's a shame you can't see much detail on the screenshots about how they're using a web browser for settings and installation. Also why are the screenshots so small as well? Strange choice

It looks good for Raspberry Pi.

Anyone try on a raspberry? I'm using ubuntu server for my Pi 3+ now, and sometimes I feel a bit slow response.

> Unfortunately, we report here that these apps not working on our system namely .., Emacs, Firefox, MPV, SMPlayer ... VLC, ...

How is it possible to create a Linux version that doesn't run Emacs? Shame, sounded interesting otherwise.

these days OSes are the base for a browser for daily use for most people, browser is essential, what browser is used? chrome alone is heavier than the whole OS image.

says Midori is installed by default, which I thought was a webkit browser but apparently they switched over to electron in 2019

Note that the reason for most webkit2gtk Browsers to switch to electron is that webkit2gtk isn't receiving security updates anymore. It's basically unmaintained, apple-style.

interesting, i thought the electron policy was also that it was not intended to be a (secure) web browser environment

Interesting project, will try this out.

Just wondering, why is that important that the OS is from Switzerland? Does it help that much in their marketing or does it matter?

Also, from the practical proint of view, what does it matter for the opensource project to be originating from specific country? Don't they accept PRs from outside Switzerland or what?

>"Just wondering, why is that important that the OS is from Switzerland"

Maybe because people who posted feel this way. They do not need anyone's approval for that.

At least here (Italy) the attibute "svizzero" (swiss), used in sentences like "it works like a swiss clock" or "like a swiss railway" or even only as "swiss precision" or "swiss timetable" is a synonim of punctuality, exactness, reliability (and also means, but this is digressing, somewhat boring).

At best, "maybe they felt that way" is a terrible answer.

But the question was why is it important. Your answer isn't even for the question they asked!

>At best, "maybe they felt that way" is a terrible answer.

I actually found the question rather terrible and rhetoric at best. And I think my answer is right on mark.

You didn't answer the actual question though.

I believe you saw an implication that 'Swiss' shouldn't be there. Then you reacted to that implication, by saying they can put 'Swiss' there if they feel like it. Is my understanding correct?

The problem is, while you responded to that implication, you skipped responding to the actual question. The question was what motivated putting 'Swiss' there. It might be something as simple as 'national pride', or it might be more complicated. And personally I think it's at least reasonable to ask.

I understand a desire to address an implication you dislike, to call it bad rhetoric or whatever, and to say the actual question isn't worth touching. But, like, the HN guidelines specifically say you should respond to the strongest interpretation of the post you're replying to. The strongest interpretation is that "Why is that important that the OS is from Switzerland?" is a real question, and the answer could actually matter. If you completely ignore the text of a valid question in an attempt to address the subtext, you're not "right on mark".

>"The strongest interpretation is ..."

1) this is your strongest interpretation. Mine is different.

2) I do not consult law book every time I brush my teeth. They'll survive me doing it wrong way

Gives it some personality, finally. Most open source projects totally lack that.

Yeah! I remember PeppermintOS, another lightweight distro, was developed locally, for the most part. I used that for a long time. Apparently it's still a thing but I think the developers are now in many different places. I'll have to check it out again now that Mint has broken for me.

It works for watches and chocolate, apparently.

And not for email anymore...

Now I’m wondering why you asked that question without also offering up where you are posting from, for greater context and information in communication :^)

You're confused why the person who thinks location is unimportant didn't say their location?

I don't get it. Is there a joke flying over my head here?

A distro needs a lot more trust than a comment.

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