Tiny Core Linux 4.7 overhauls the OnDemand system | Hacker News Reader

Tiny Core Linux 4.7 overhauls the OnDemand system

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35 pointsseminatore5 comments

This looks interesting to use a vm dev machine. Install it under vmware or something alike on your mac/pc and run your sites/apps live over there.

It seems to me there are huge advantages to doing that because if your run mamp on your mac for web development your quickly bump into problems like installing memcached or non-mac services. You also get more experienced with linux..

There actually already is something available for this called TurnKey Linux (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/).

A quick hint, if you do develop sites locally on your mac and get annoyed with Mac's weird dns lookup (.local, skipping the hosts file if it's not in a specific format.. etc) check out Dnsmasq (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnsmasq). You can install it on your mac using port.

I find these sorts of "micro" distributions academically interesting but I don't see the point for web development. There are great uses for distributions like this for small-scale stuff (I've loaded something similar on one of my RPi devices) but for web developers I'd look elsewhere because RAM is really cheap. The most RAM-starved machine I've had in the last four years has been 8GB; I currently have 16GB in my rMBP and regularly run a five-VM stack (frontend, backend, memcached, database, Puppetmaster--I like having them on separate machines because that's how it'd be in production). Each VM has a gig of RAM and runs Ubuntu Server and things are pretty peachy.

Biggest beef with VMWare Fusion is that it doesn't support Workstation teams...

I like TinyCore because it boots in a second or two in a VM, and the VM images can be really small. It's not really any help with RAM usage, if you run Firefox or Apache or the like it will chew up the RAM as usual.

For example, I have a Mint appliance that's about two gigs, while my Tinycore version is 200 megs. It's pretty nice to have that fallback when you have to retrieve it over the internet.

I would love to see an official release of this distribution for the Raspberry Pi. Heck, even the CorePlus distribution weighs in at a mere 64 MiB. I think if you were to need an RPi for real-time operation, you could mix Tiny Core and the RTLinux kernel modules and have quite a reasonable latency.

I find it interesting that someone got a version of tinycore booting on EC2. Although, he has yet to describe in full what he had to do. http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,14057.0.html

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