Hi, On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > >> http://lennartb.home.xs4all.nl/linux.html >> >> has plenty of pointers for creating your own minimalist Linux bootdisk. >> Personally, I'm still looking for a minimalistic Linux distro that >> contains GCC. Somewhere around 500MB to 1GB maximum. > > Rugxulo probably knows one :-)
Doubt it. Minimal doesn't exist anymore. People just assume you have tons of RAM and HD. "xyz is cheap" (so is talk!!!), very annoying. Anyways, it just depends on what you want. A simple cmdline only Linux for booting DOSEMU would be cool. >> If you have a recently modern machine that allows booting from USB, get >> a cheap USB flash drive and install Linux to it. A tool like RUFUS can >> help you if you happen to run Windows. I don't think a real rescue disk >> for Linux exists, likely considered a security risk. I have not tried lately, but remember that Fedora 14 i686 installed correctly to USB and saved persistent changes. It was pretty cool. Unfortunately, it hosed itself for unknown reasons (and F15 had a bug that didn't save changes). So I haven't tried lately, but they do exist (but ... caveat emptor). > One of the most classic single floppy linuxes is TOMSRBT: > > http://www.toms.net/rb/ - have a look at the FAQ to know > more details. Note that oversized floppy formats may be > problematic with USB floppy or for bootable flash / DVD > or similar. But for the latter two, you can simply jump > to the standard 2.88 MB format. Most real floppy drives > only support 1.44 MB and oversized variations of that, > e.g. 1.68 MB, but a 2.88 MB boot floppy image on a CD-R > or DVD-RW or similar is quite normal and easy :-) "Nobody" is using floppies anymore. (And of course that's completely 100% proven statistic, ugh.) I really just mean that most people "don't care". So you're up the creek by yourself without a paddle. Enjoy doing everything yourself. ;-( Yeah, I don't like overformatted, and "most" (?) OSes don't barely support USB floppy drives either, esp. not with non-standard sizes. Anyways, tomsrtbt is old (2002?) and only kernel 2.2.0 with Lua 4.0 [sic] with wget and telnet (no IRC, not www). I wouldn't really recommend it. Something like BlueFlops (two floppies, kernel 2.4 or maybe 2.6?) is better (irc, links www?) but also old and (I think) also abandoned. They should've used UPX more, heh. >> PS: http://lennartb.home.xs4all.nl/coreboot/coreboot.html for more fun, >> especially on a tiny 80486 board like [ http://bifferos.co.uk/ ] > > Interesting, also in context of smartphones and other ARM > platforms (tablets, some netbooks) which include increasing > temptations to DRM everything and only allow software from > a licensed shop instead of keeping the user in control :-p I do have an Lenovo Android 3.2 tablet now (unwanted gift from aunts), which I finally (four months late) opened. It's fairly nice, I guess, and is fairly speedy and quite functional, surprisingly, but yeah, even Android makes it less easy (though not really hard) to get 3rd party stuff. (Enable 3rd party downloads in settings, but those .apk files still need to be signed or it won't even consider installing them. So far, SL4A and BRexx were all I really wanted.) > PS: I think Rugxulo also had some few-floppy Linux distro > in his bookmarks. That distro is modular and has stuff like > graphical interface, browsers and compilers as module afair. There was an old old old one like that (muLinux) that I guess? you're referring to. It had GCC 2.7.2, Netscape, old old DOSEMU (DOS-C kernel??) that didn't run in RAM disk version, and a really old X11 and Perl. Another would be BasicLinux (2.2.0), but again, these "minimal" Linuxes, esp. floppy versions, are buggy as hell, very very old, and abandoned. I wouldn't recommend it. You'd honestly "almost" have better luck with old DOS-Minix 2.0.4 (2002?). Forget X11 completely, it's too bloated. Long story short, "lightweight" these days certainly means Pentium 2 or 3 with at least (!) 128 or 256 MB of RAM, maybe more. I'm not kidding, Linux can't really run very well in less. The days of Linux running on a 386 with 2 MB of RAM are long long long gone (though I know some people have specially crafted very wimpy subsets that can run in less). So, long story short, something like ttylinux (as Georg mentioned) is probably (y)our best bet for "minimal". But it really depends heavily on what you specifically want to do with it (run this, compile that, etc), and it's hard to please everyone (design by committee, heh). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
