2012/11/26 Ciprian Dorin Craciun <ciprian.craciun_AT_gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 8:53 PM, Hugues Moretto-Viry
> <hugues.moretto_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just because I'm really curious, I'm searching minimal GNU/Linux
>> distributions with the following options:
>>
>> - x86_64 architecture
>> - minimal installation
>> - no default Desktop Environment
>> - rolling release
>
>
> I don't know which are rolling release and which aren't, also I
> think most of them are 32 bit only, but below you can find some Linux
> distributions I found closing to these requirements. (Of course I
> didn't try any of them myself, but I've read about them).
>
> Boot from RO media, doesn't require a RW disk:
> * http://alpinelinux.org/ -- would give it a closer look, I think
> it's the most "mature";
> * http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/ -- nice idea, don't
> know how "stable" it is;
>
> Could be made to work with RO media, but suitable for RW disk:
> * http://www.slitaz.org/ -- tons of packages (old and new), but
> the package manager is kind of buggy...;
> * Ubuntu Core -- comes as a `tar.gz`, containing only the minimum
> necessary tools to run Ubuntu;
>
> For embedded, but usable on x86:
> * OpenWRT;
>
> But now about the feasibility of such an idea:
> * I tend to agree with Hadrian Węgrzynowski, when he says it's
> better to have a very stable "core" (kernel + basic tools), and then
> maintain customized version of a few packages;
> * I currently would just take the packages from a "mainstream"
> stable distribution (like Debian), and replace their package manager
> with something which extracts just some paths (like `/bin`, `/lib` and
> ignores docs, man pages, etc.)
>
> Ciprian.
>
> P.S.: As someone remarked earlier it's unclear what you want such
> a distribution for: (a) desktop usage, (b) rescue usage, (c) appliance
> usage, (d) something else?
>
I haven't followed this discussion so I'm sorry if have misunderstood
what you are after. When I want to have a small distro for some
specialized task I usually just combine the kernel with busybox to get
something very simple and then I just compile and add whatever program
I might need. If this is an option I could give you the url to the git
repository I use that you can easily just checkout and run make in and
it will give you a compiled kernel with a absolutly minimal cpio
ramdisk containing only busybox and some scripts needed in order to
boot.
// Jens
Received on Mon Nov 26 2012 - 20:23:36 CET