Re: [dev] which minimal os

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 8:33 PM, Michael Farnbach
<noble.oblige_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> As with most answers, this one depends on a few things...
>
> Do you want it tiny for an alternative arch, like ARM?
> Do you want it tiny and fast, because it is running on something really old?
> Do you want it tiny and fast because you are running something beefy and
> common (i5, etc..) but running it into the ground with blender, and you just
> want the OS to stay out of the way?
> Or are you doing it just for the feeling of being spartan and free? How
> spartan are you willing to go? How much do you want to bleed? Is this just
> an adventure, or what?
>
> Well, here's the answers I have.
>
> Debian rules on ARM. There's a number of tuned distro's to different ARM
> platforms. Wiki is your friend to investigate.
> Tiny Core, Goat, Puppy, Arch (crunchbang, archbang) and a few others really
> come through here. You'll find these (the ones I know of at least) are
> either Debian, Slackware, or LSF based. Although consider staying on the
> console (see note on GRML below).
> You can run the answers for #2 for this, or the full distros that they come
> from in a minimal mode. But for "stay out of the way" while running the
> latest obscure packages, if you know what you are doing there's nothing
> better than Gentoo -- but you have to be willing to do your own work.
> There's a lot of junk you can do away with if you start from scratch, and
> Gentoo next to that. It is a great development environment, and for all
> those reasons its a great way to have it your way.
>
> If you want to try something harkening back to the 2005 days of Gentoo (back
> when it was the brand spanking new baby of a brilliant programmer), try
> Exherbo. Its not that spanking-new clean, but its very reminiscent of those
> days.
> If you really want it your way (your own init scripts or even compiled C
> init, you'll have to start with LSF, and then develop from there).
>
> Sure, Plan9, old school FreeDOS, Qnix, Hurd, one of the BSD's ... I dunno ..
> what is the most "hurt me plenty" distro that is like a light-weight camping
> adventure roughing it under a big blue sky? Qnix and Plan9 have the
> advantage of their own novel networking models. But for real bare bones,
> then there's a the OS's written in assembly ... MenuetOS, Kolibri, Mike OS,
> BareMetalOS, etc...
>
> Some honorable mentions ... GRML (you may never be more productive on the
> command line). It is my go-to linux distro for any time I want to run on a
> computer that I don't want to change the OS.

I have been looking at Tinycore for my Cr-48 netbook, once I have time
to take it apart to flash the BIOS anyway. Anyone have any
tips/observations about using Tinycore as a day to day distro?
Received on Wed Feb 16 2011 - 19:31:46 CET