On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 03:04:41AM -0700, Cherba, Mike wrote:
>    You might try looking into Damn Small Linux (DSL)
>    http://www.damnsmalllinux.org .  This distro is <50MB desktop
>    targeted.  Debian based.  The guys there claim they ran and browsed
>    the web/played mp3s on 486DX parts with 16MB RAM.  There are others.
>    Just take a flip through distrowatch  and see who report very small
>    iso sizes.  You might also try checking out some of the distro's
>    listed under
>    http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Distributions/ to see if
>    they meet your requirements.  Itmight help if you could put your reqs
>    in a list and post them.  I'm not sure which thing you are looking
>    for more importantly than others.

Actually, the thing I did was a pretty large ISO.  =)  What seperated it
from Debian was not its size, but rather its lack of 16 or so loosely or
completely un-integrated webservers, 4 desktop environments, 7 mail
servers, 12 versions of emacs, some 20 different window managers, and,
well you're getting the idea I hope.  It's pretty silly overall.

I'm just about positive DSL doesn't come with a full suite of GNU file,
shell, etc utils.  Its X must be stripped down as well.  If it's a 50 MB
desktop, docs must have been left out.  (I went and put together a custom
variant of a webserver so that it could be used as a documentation server
on localhost using dwww!)

It was absolutely tiny by modern standards, but it was a relatively full
CD which provided a pretty full system.  What it didn't provide was the
huge redundancy the average linux user associates with "power" because it
interfered with what the average non-linux user associates with "usable".
It had more in common with Ubuntu than it would with something like DSL,
I'd guess.

And since my little additions at the time were just packages that
installed alongside the Debian package I was integrating, updates to the
Debian package (as long as configurations weren't affected) would work
with my integration.  The nice thing about my setup was that it was
integrated without lock-in.  You could literally just use Debian after
installing my ISO, and in fact I never had a seperate repository other
than my 10MB personal webspace.

I provided two webservers, one for light duty (it could serve personal web
pages to the outside world, but it wasn't meant to do so on a large
scale), and the other was apache.  My Apache came with an extra package to
tie it into my little config tool.  If you replaced my webservers with
your own, you just wouldn't control it with the config tool--you'd use the
/etc/init.d interface.


I appreciate the suggestion though.
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