[CALUG] Minimalist Distro

[Bryan J Smith]

On Sun, 2010-01-24 at 16:52 -0800, Ben W wrote:
> Relatively simple question here, I'm looking for as light of weight -
> and current - distro as I can find for a server. I'm only realy
> familiar with Debian variants and am thinking of building off a base
> install, but I'm curious if there's anything anyone else would
> suggest?
>  
> *By lightweight I realy only need to be able to get onto a network out
> of the box, I'd prefer to build from as little as possible than sift
> through services and cut out what I don't need. They'll be the basis
> for a woefuly underpowered processing cluster, if anyone has any
> additional input on that.

Debian has been, and will continue to be, an outstanding distro fro
such.  I don't see any reason to use anything else if you're already
familiar with Debian.

At most, I could only suggest a few others ...

- Slackware, the original.  If you're already a fan of APT-DPKG, this
might seem like a regression, although their is Slack-APT as well.

- Gentoo, ports/source build.  Gentoo is an interesting project that
finally brought the "ports" concept from the BSD world to Linux, and put
it on steroids.  Ignore half of the Gentoo community that talks about
"optimization," Gentoo is really about managing a system build to be
small and just what you need -- without having to go Linux From Scratch
(LFS) which is not manageable.

- Damn Small Linux (DSL) and variants.  There are a number out there
like DSL if you really need to fit something in a tiny space.  Frankly,
if I'm doing embedded, I'm doing Gentoo or considering an
embedded-specific distro -- e.g., Montavista, based on Red Hat if I need
3+ years of updates, or Timesys reference distro, based on Fedora if I
need targets that Gentoo doesn't do.


-- 
Bryan J Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org>