[techtalk] Small Linux distributions?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 11:57:30PM +1000 or thereabouts, Neale Green wrote:
> Could anyone advise me of, and/or point me in the direction of (URL) some
> preferred Linux distributions for operations on systems with limited
> resources, please?
> 
> I'm currently working with a slightly modified old 486 DX2/50 laptop with 24
> MB memory, 200 MB disk, and no CD-ROM, trying to get a mobile Linux box for
> a project. The lack of Laptop means that I need to either do a Floppy
> install ( difficult with the size of today's distributions ), or download
> one of the smaller distributions onto the disk (I have a boot disk which
> will let me get a MS Network connection via a PCMCIA Ethernet card).

It depends on the work you want to do. There are installations which
come on a single floppy but they tend to be rather focused :) Things
like the Linux Router Project and stuff, which may not help if you 
want to run emacs...

I had a PC110 (486 with about that amount of disk and memory, no CD 
drive but a floppy drive and something for networking which I now
forget).

Despite knowing RH far better, I put Debian (slink) on it, since I 
gathered you could trim it down more easily. I did a floppy install
to get the base on, discovered the lack of sensible editors, still
managed to set up networking, and did the rest of it over the network
from the machine with the slink CDs in.

I removed all manner of things with dselect (if you haven't met it,
read the tutorial that comes in the Debian install docs first, and
it will tell you enough to use it). This included the obvious (TeX :))
to the less obvious (X) and the just plain silly (groff -- which meant
removing all the man pages to satisfy dependencies. So I unpacked the
apt and dpkg man pages and stuck them on a handy RH box instead. Ahem.)

It did work. I've heard you can end up going round in circles in
dselect hell, but I was just removing as much as I could that still
gave me a functioning system and it went fine.

> Anyway, I'm hoping that there are distributions out there that others have
> found which will run in the smaller, slower boxes a bit better (preferably
> with a DOS executable kickoff), could anyone suggest any please?

Dunno about that bit. I also don't know about how big the minimal
potato (came after slink) install is. When I got around to potato
I had a bigger box to put it on. I do not know what the current
minimum size for any of the distros are in fact, except that the
RH 7.0 box says 32megs of ram and 500 for hard drive. I think 5.2
was a lot smaller :) 

Telsa