[CALUG] Minimalist Distro

[James Ewing Cottrell 3rd]

Bryan's suggestions are all good.

Another good choice is Puppy Linux, which runs entirely in core. Puppy 
can even run as a LiveCD, writing your home directory as another session 
to a multisession CD or DVD. TinyCore Linux also runs in core.

Lubuntu is Ubuntu with the (lightweight) LXDE Desktop.

LinuxMint is a nice derivation of Ununtu.

Typing "linux distributions" to google produces a wealth of informative 
links. I generally use distrowatch.com as my first stop, but some of the 
other links have a better catalog on the first page.

Here are a few to keep you busy:

http://distrowatch.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions
http://lwn.net/Distributions/
http://www.linuxbasis.com/distributions.html

I added the word "small" to the google search term and get another 
interesting list, but I'm starting to get lazy here.

Enjoy,

JIM

Bryan J Smith wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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