Really small distro

tba

Anybody know of a distro that would fit on 60 mb?

or should I chuck this HD out?

aidan_walsh

DSL: 50MB of Penguin Power

tba

sweet

Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram

might have to grab some more ram...

niallb

Woah, hold on there.
Grab a time machine.
Is this a really old machine?
Try a really old distro.

Damn Small won't even boot on it.
How much memory do you have?
What type is it?
I might have some around.

I was running multiuser on an 8MB 486
using slackware a long time ago.
One person using X, and two of us connected to the
serial ports using old 286's as terminals.
The kernel was 1.1.59 I think.
It was also before the change to ELF binaries.
You'll save loads of memory by going back to that
kind of distro, and it might be fun.

As I remember installing it from 40 floppies,
it sould fit on a 60MB drive :-)

For a more modern distro - ttylinux is your best bet.
Needs 5MB runninfrom harddisk.

NiallB

Capt'n Midnight

puppy linux - windows like interface but needs swap file on HDD, though next release should run from key

Khannie

tba wrote:

might have to grab some more ram...

I ran a version of red hat on a 486 with 8MB before (around 1999 / 2000). It ran quite smoothly considering. It slowed considerably with a graphical interface. 8MB is actually quite a lot of memory really. (no seriously).

Ste-

niallb wrote:

Woah, hold on there.
Grab a time machine.
Is this a really old machine?
Try a really old distro.

Damn Small won't even boot on it.
How much memory do you have?
What type is it?
I might have some around.

I was running multiuser on an 8MB 486
using slackware a long time ago.
One person using X, and two of us connected to the
serial ports using old 286's as terminals.
The kernel was 1.1.59 I think.
It was also before the change to ELF binaries.
You'll save loads of memory by going back to that
kind of distro, and it might be fun.

As I remember installing it from 40 floppies,
it sould fit on a 60MB drive :-)

For a more modern distro - ttylinux is your best bet.
Needs 5MB runninfrom harddisk.

NiallB

What version of Slackware was that ?
I have an old 486 with around 4MB of memory I think.
It's old memory so there's not much hope of getting more.

ethernet

DSL [Damn Small Linux] takes up ~50 MB and seemingly works quite well with little RAM.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

themole

a 60MB drive?

that must be hella old and bound to die any day soon.

i would try to give/sell it to a museum tbh

tba

they built 'em tough back in the twentieth century!

Why back in my day I once used one to prop up an old table leg etc...

niallb

Ste- wrote:

What version of Slackware was that ?
I have an old 486 with around 4MB of memory I think.
It's old memory so there's not much hope of getting more.

It was just called "Slackware" - no version number!
The CD also had ygdrassil linux on it and a few others.
I'll take a dig around next week and see what's there.
A lot of those distros would be hard to find now.

If it's 30 pin simms it takes, I might have a box of them around.
It could get you up to 8MB anyway :-)
Redhat 4.2 would run on that.
Any more memory than that and you should go for Damn Small.

Any gentoo people have suggestions for how to strip
a distro and kernel down to a minimum by recompiling out unnecessary stuff?

NiallB

jaqian

BasicLinux: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/

http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/

It runs on 386 and up and is based on Slackware and has a lively user list, always ready to help out. Check it out.

Skrynesaver

Hi all,
Niall, I was on one of the 286s at the time, I think it was actually Slakware '96. It really rocked at the time, turned an old 486 into our very own server, ahh the memories....