MiniOS – a lightweight Linux distribution designed for USB drive
minios.dev
minios.dev
My first contact with Linux/Unix was through fli4l [1] an open source boot-from-floppy Linux router with which I shared our family’s intermittent 56k dial-up (!) links back in the day (I believe from 2000 onwards it was a single channel ISDN line; what a dream).
Then there was the famous Knoppix [2] distro; coming with many German computer magazines at least.
So yeah, all in all I’m more of a *BSD “graduate” (main reason being man pages were usually of higher quality; at the time at least) but to this day my favourite flash’n boot distro is still Debian based “headless CLI first” GRML Linux [3] (came with pre-configured zsh way before it was cool, lots of networking tools etc, a Swiss Army knife for the sysadmin).
I had been running an old underclocked PC with it as a router and for NFS - for years and only until somewhat recently.
This one (minios) looks quiet big.
But the idea looks interesting.
I think the bigger question is how to inspire someone to be interested in open source. You’d have to find something that you can do in Linux but not in another OS.
Maybe show them how to host a web server. Or show them some screenshots of how cool a customized Linux desktop can look. Would be curious to hear some more ideas
[2] http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26201.0.html
[3] http://tinycorelinux.net/14.x/x86/tcz/
(not sure what their beef is with https...)
I do miss the times when their microcore was around 6-8MB's
I'm obviously a youngling
Edit: This is how my first DSL modem (without routing facility) looked like: https://www.teltarif.de/arch/2009/kw27/10jahredsl-rueckblick...
But now, i can buy a 128gb usb drive for ~7eur at my local supermarket, why even bother with "mini"? Just install a full ubuntu, apt-get install everything else needed, possibly neded or just "nice to have", and you still have 115gb free for other stuff. Split the drive into two partitions and have one encrypted for private data, and you're done.
haha, great word choices in a discussion about memory sticks.
I remember using it (or rather a predecessor of that I believe) to turn a Pentium-II class PC without hard drive into a fully functioning router to share my broad band internet connection with a neighbor back in the early 2000s where direct dial-up was still a thing even with broadband. It was an easy, mostly pre-configured setup. We had to power-cycle the PC every couple of weeks because it halted sometimes but other than it worked like charm and was actually running from a single 3.5" HD floppy. (For the younger audience: floppies were looking like 3D printed save buttons. ;)
Puppy encrypted the entire OS on USB. So it would boot fine but needed to be decrypted during the boot process.
It contained all my apps, system settings and smaller files (docs, html, passwords, personal docs, etc) that I decided to save in the encrypted OS/USB.
The laptop's mounted HD contained the larger stuff... tons of videos, pics, etc.. basically all the stuff I didn't really need to protect/encrypt.
Someone could steal the laptop and I wouldn't care (all that large stuff is always backed up too on externals). Someone could steal the USB and they'd have to know it was a bootable, encrypted USB. Even so, they'd also need to know how to decrypt on boot. I felt so safe even when traveling.
I could also plug my USB into any laptop and BOOM! ready to go:-) It was like a plug-n-play super-power.
I saw MiniOS listed here and I immediately thought of my old Puppy setup. Looking forward to giving this OS a spin. I hope it considers my use case in their thinking (though I'm sure I can tweak it easily to fulfill my needs).
If it was so good why did you stop?
I used Puppy too a while ago but found that once I wanted to run something that the Puppy guys hadn't packaged that it was a bit more work to install things. That's probably not the case now that there is a Debian based Pup, perhaps I should consider trying again.
This was maybe 14 years ago. I sold the netbook and started using Windows full time again. I was still in this middle state between using Linux and Windows - going back and forth between the two.
When I decided the leave Windows completely (Windows 10 spyware release summer/2015), I settled on a full-featured distro. I did some serious homework, a bit of distro-hopping and finally settled on Linux Mint Cinnamon.
You are right, sometimes (often) installing must have apps on Puppy was a challenge - this was a factor now that I was a full-time Linux user.
As a full time (still newbie user), I wanted access to every tool in the Linux world in the easiest way possible. I didn't want to hit a wall that might cause me to consider using Windows again.
Exploring the system was fun as f*ck in a geeky way.
Now I just go the fastest route to a Kde install
I hope kids today find the weird world of user-friendly operating systems (license- and tinkering-wise) just as interesting as we once did.
Yes! This was it exactly. Running Puppy in RAM on my old netbook was amazing:-)
With that said - most modern applications are webapps for good reasons. Making native apps sucks for a lot of reasons - including all the random OS-specific behavior you have to work around, specific versions of native OS libraries, etc.
Building for the web browser means, without any extra effort, you app works on all operating systems, and it works exactly the same. That's a pretty good sell to anyone trying to make a modern application that's mostly just a front-end UI for an API...
For example this page has action buttons and community links with a video on the first page, a written blurb about system configuration on the second page, screenshots/visual showcase on the third page, etc.
Personally I'm on the fence. I think it probably more often than not tends to be annoying, like most overrides of default conventions, and feels more like you're being force-fed marketing instead of reading information. This specific page would probably work just as well if they kept the sections, dividers, and even the animations, but just let you scroll naturally.
But then, maybe it gets them more downloads or something.
But yes, the downside is that some people think that websites, that really just should be pages, get gamified and abused like this.
P.S: Last sentence probably violates HN guidelines and is just rude and unnecessary if you want to prove a point.
After reading the hint here, and trying it out, my back stack is polluted a lot.
Scroll bars universally suck nowadays. Maybe my "mouse accuracy" isn't what it used to be - since giving up first person shooters 16 years ago - but I shouldn't need railgun accuracy to hit a fucking scroll bar 99% of the time. Why are they a single pixel wide these days, it's not like screen-width is expensive real-estate these days, is this Apple/Ive design principles gone mad? And then there's the page resizing when the scroll bar appears that makes it look as if the whole screen has refreshed, and then it re-refreshes without the scroll-bar in the intervening time that I paused my actions wondering why the screen refreshed in the first place.
/end old man rant.
I'm looking at you Teams, Discord and maybe Slack?
Turns out MS Windows has one, too, since Windows 10. Here you press the Windows Logo Key + v.
Edit: I went back... not they don't even recognize small scroll ticks, they just ignore them... :) You have to violently scroll to progress.
With LilDeb, I made a layer atop Debian Live, including an optional mutable partition, and curated a package mix and configs for it: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/
A current implementation of the same abilities is probably the source used to spin SpiralLinux. I haven't tried this myself but it at least looks possible.
In general the UI doesn't even look good. It's just a bunch of unflattering grey.
https://artemis.sh/2022/07/15/decision-making-is-finite.html
Might have less to do with the post and more to do with my own fond memories of Puppy and it's community
And it was fine for me to log in and poke at it, for a while - after all, I only used it as a side hack thing while I waited for my work-related MIPS pizzabox and other things to do their other thing, for which I was paid, at the time.
But then came Yggdrasil.
I 'temporarily' yanked the CD drive out of my bosses 486 editing/gaming machine, popped the floppy into da' box, flipped the switch, and up she booted in glorious VGA 640x400.
A kind-of working X workstation, which .. everyone in the dev team .. found it kind of an astonishing feat for this much belittled 386 toy. "Okay then, we've got an extra term .. do the network drivers work?", as we chortled at the frequency flop.
And so it began. Oh, what a world that little kernel has wrought, and I am eternally grateful for the fact of its existence, my ability to use it and push it out into the wide, wide world personally, and so on.
The USB boots are great. Totally down for Terabyte+FAST USB sticks, though, sooner or later .. I mean, "my bootable USB stick is a compute stick, kthx.."
What a ride.
Pretty cool to see the functionality increase with portability. Although, floppy disk space is significantly less than a USB drive.
LGR has a video on a PC-based appliance (a wireless access point) where the "firmware" source was a walled-off 3.5" drive with a floppy inside. That one ran DR-DOS however: https://youtu.be/DOkapxbW93g
Make it need JavaScript so you can make scrolling into a slow, clunky slideshow where the text has additional delay before appearing... Absolutely brilliant /s
Good example of modern bad website design... at least in my opinion. Sigh... that's what web frameworks and the 10 layers of complexity are for right?
But then I'd also like to have a backup solution
Let's assume this would become your main OS. It would need to run on any hardware, that means support for l the archs, or at least x86 and arm (in the broadest sense). And it would need lightweight (in the actual sense) backups. I'm thinking about a backup station where you insert you main OS stick before you go to bed. It would have 2 drives, in case 1 fails. And an ethernet port (or wifi additionally) for external backups.
So you insert it, go to bed and when you wake up you have internal and external backups.
But I think that there aren't too many people interested in having their main OS on a USB drive.
One might have to provide a cpu/ram/drive bay along with it. And there would need to be a simple drive swapping process and low cost case replacement option. USB should not bottleneck the data transfer rates.
So I searched and of course something similar already exists. But not the way I envisioned it. A USB 3.2 to m.2 adapter, with its own power supply, and a sata 3 port where you can plug in a drive to create or restore backups. No ethernet port or network connectivity.
My vision is a case, a station, that does incremental backups to 2 slot inserted drives and optionally to (configurable) remote targets in sequence.
The USB port would need to be high quality.
Would I support SATA? No, maybe. Initially only m.2 connectors.
If you click on the "News" menu item, you need to have Telegram app installed. :(
My thinking was that rather than lugging a laptop back and forth from work to home, I would just have a computer at each, and just bring my USB key with.
My co-workers said everything would feel slow, but with 500mb/s usb thumb drives with 512gb, I think it should be fine.
I just might try MiniOS.
Or you can use GRUB for an EXTx type volume instead of FAT32.
Some of the major distributions are about 4GB now, and with most PC's having 4GB or more of memory, once booted the whole thing runs from memory, often with no default ability for further routine user reads or writes to the live stick once booted.
Alternatively the distribution of choice can be installed to a blank formatted stick instead of an internal drive. Instead of run live from the USB where there is no default persistence to any apps you may "install" while booted live.
It's not really that slow any more, the initial full write to the stick is usuallly the only frustrating time-consuming operation.
Booting to the stick is also slower than booting to an internal drive, often not by much though, and once booted there is so much that then runs from memory, there are not that many additional reads or writes to push through the USB bottleneck.
Get yourself a full-performance USB 3.x stick, something like Sandisk Extreme and a full size distribution will boot just as fast as something mini on a cheap USB3.0 stick:
https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
These minis would boot reeally fast on a full-performance stick like that.
Window To Go also does quite well once booting it from the stick has taken place. The latest Windows 10 32-bit ISO when deployed in CompactOS mode only takes up less than 4GB and it boots just as fast from a stick as a full Linux of the same size. Compared to Linux there is some lag in some operations since Windows does a lot more reads & writes during operation than Linux usually needs. Unfortunately there's been no new W10 ISO in quite some time, so the first Windows Update makes it use more than two additional GB of storage. Still takes up only a little more than 1GB of RAM for W10x32 if you push in that direction, but 32-bit can only properly access somewhat less than 4GB of RAM no matter how much memory you have in excess of that. This may be enough free memory for many uses still these days though.
Even Windows 11 to Go without using compactOS, which uses about 20GB of drive storage to start with, runs just as good once booted. It just takes that much more time proportionately when booting to transfer more GB from the stick to the memory before you reach the deaktop.
One, you can have your data/software literally in your pocket assuming that's the threat model you are dealing with.
The other scenarios I could think of involve too much friction to stick with it for long term.
[1] https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Mini-OS [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2003-xens...
I thought this was the future back then, but now we all just carry entire computing devices with more storage than that and call them phones.
I can't believe it's still in development.
The usefulness day-to-day is pretty limited, however, assuming you're just carrying it around and also have access to proper installations.
What am I missing out on?
I currently have xubuntu 22.04 installed on it an constantly struggling to free up space for upgrades.
Or what could I remove from it to free up space?
"The system-constructor, in its basic version, is an analogue of the >>>>Stantard<<<< version"
SliTaz might have been my favorite. TIL initial release was 2008.
https://forum.slitaz.org/topic/usage-of-slitaz-40-rolling/pa...
What in the world about the first page was so essential that it needed a JS version?