[HN Gopher] MiniOS - a lightweight Linux distribution designed f...
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MiniOS - a lightweight Linux distribution designed for USB drive
Author : akagusu
Score : 83 points
Date : 2023-10-04 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (minios.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (minios.dev)
| nashashmi wrote:
| lightweight OS needs a lightweight website. It needs to work
| without JS.
|
| What in the world about the first page was so essential that it
| needed a JS version?
| devsda wrote:
| Apart from being a rescue os, what are some common usecases where
| it helps ?
|
| One, you can have your data/software literally in your pocket
| assuming that's the threat model you are dealing with.
|
| The other scenarios I could think of involve too much friction to
| stick with it for long term.
| wafer_thin wrote:
| os for containers need to be small. eg Alpine Linux: the tiny
| os underneath a ton of docker containers has been downloaded >
| 1 billion times. But the website for miniOS seems to have
| design in mind which is at odds with this use case. Alpine's
| website is bland and unexciting - which appeals to me ;).
| giantg2 wrote:
| Reminds me of DSL - Damn Small Linux. Only those were the days of
| running on a floppy.
| downrightmike wrote:
| That's a name I haven't heard of in a long while
| http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ 50MB ISO, last release was in
| 2008, a year before the first version of MiniOS came out.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| muLinux (live distro based on a modular set of floppy disks,
| including X11 and gcc... and somewhat questionable English
| grammar) and the Knoppix CD and later DVD were pretty cool too.
| Oh, and tomsrtbt, "the most GNU/Linux on a floppy disk"!
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Or Puppy Linux! The first day I popped that CD drive in and was
| able to run the internet browser ten times faster than I ever
| could on my decrepit family computer was a magical moment for
| me. It made me realize just how much power was being wasted on
| things I neither knew nor cared about under the surface.
| autumn-antlers wrote:
| I liked this post about Puppy Linux so much it's linked on my
| home page (nvm that i dont have any other pages):
|
| https://artemis.sh/2022/07/15/decision-making-is-finite.html
|
| Might have less to do with the post and more to do with my
| own fond memories of Puppy and it's community
| anthk wrote:
| Today I used the opposite approach. I began with Debian,
| next SuSE8, Knoppix, Aurox, Debian Sarge for lots of years,
| and, after OpenBSD, I use Hyperbola with a pretty sparse
| cwm with uxterm, links+, and for music/podcasts I use two
| scripts: sfeed_download, anonradio, tpradio and amused
| playing my collections at random. No bling bling, almost no
| features with sfeed.
| account-5 wrote:
| I don't consider this very mini. Not when compared with the likes
| of slitaz, puppy, or Tiny Core. Or how this would be better that
| usb specific distros like porteus and slax.
| musha68k wrote:
| Although most distros should work out of the box these days (I
| think?) nothing beats these smaller ones for interested people
| and especially "younglings" to try out; "running from a stick".
|
| My first contact with Linux/Unix was through fli4l [1] an open
| source boot-from-floppy Linux router with which I shared our
| family's intermittent 56k dial-up (!) links back in the day (I
| believe from 2000 onwards it was a single channel ISDN line; what
| a dream).
|
| Then there was the famous Knoppix [2] distro; coming with many
| German computer magazines at least.
|
| So yeah, all in all I'm more of a *BSD "graduate" (main reason
| being man pages were usually of higher quality; at the time at
| least) but to this day my favourite flash'n boot distro is still
| Debian based "headless CLI first" GRML Linux [3] (came with pre-
| configured zsh way before it was cool, lots of networking tools
| etc, a Swiss Army knife for the sysadmin).
|
| I had been running an old underclocked PC with it as a router and
| for NFS - for years and only until somewhat recently.
|
| [1] http://www.fli4l.de
|
| [2] http://knoppix.net/
|
| [3] https://grml.org/
| WillAdams wrote:
| One convenience which I miss is the distributions which would
| mount NTFS and allow installation into a directory --- very
| convenient and made for a very low bar of entry.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Came for the interesting headline on HN, left after 10 seconds
| because of the horrible unusable webpage.
| __bjoernd wrote:
| And no one notices the name clash with Xen's mini-os [1]. We've
| come a long way since Xen and the Art of Virtualization [2].
|
| [1] https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Mini-OS [2]
| https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2003-xens...
| vmfunction wrote:
| with usb at about 256gb - 1tb now. Looking forward to a world
| were everyone carries their computer in a usb.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Write throughput and flash lifetime are still a concern for
| that.
| lomereiter wrote:
| You could buy a USB enclosure for an M.2 NVMe SSD - a bit
| bulkier but still portable and addresses your concerns.
| [deleted]
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Laptops typically have 8 GB or more RAM which is a lot more
| than you need of r a lightweight OS; perhaps the rest could
| be used as a cache that is periodically flushed to the USB.
| For most uses of such a device there isn't much writing going
| on anyway.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This is one of those sites that hijacks your scrolling, which I
| wish there was a standard for "please just let me scroll freely".
| It's not super awful but its kind of annoying, I like to read
| things on either the top or bottom edge of my browser window so I
| dont lose my spot.
| ploum wrote:
| It is sad because I was interested but my first thought was "if
| you can't make a basic usable webpage, how can I trust you to
| make a minimal usable operating system". And I closed the tab.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Did exactly the same!
| demandingturtle wrote:
| That's a bit harsh. If it was from a web dev company, sure.
| But this is from someone doing it as a hobby for the good of
| mankind. Yeah, the might not work for some people but it's
| not the end of the world. It's like saying that girl has one
| strand of hair out of place so I'm not going to date her. You
| must be fun to be around.
| dekken_ wrote:
| it's super obnoxious, even when it's only slight sensitivity
| changes (which it isn't here) I notice it and feel violated
| Narishma wrote:
| I also hijacks the back button.
| Pfiffer wrote:
| Real question: Why is this even allowed at a browser level?
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Because some people think that Browsers should be the
| ultimate app platform, so hijacking your inputs or preventing
| proper zoom makes sense to them even though it's utterly user
| hostile.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Which has led us to regress in terms of building GUI
| desktop apps. Remember the 2000s and 90s how you could make
| a somewhat native UI in Visual Basic 6 and Delphi, now you
| got to use an entire browser to get there.
| nilamo wrote:
| You can still do that. And it'll still only run on one
| operating system, just like it used to.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Java didn't only run on one OS but for whatever reason
| Oracle seems to find no value in making its UI stack
| nicer and modern. It seems only Microsoft's C# stack is
| working on this. There's also Qt, which is not a single-
| OS solution, but its C++.
| Alupis wrote:
| Well, there is JavaFX, which is really nice for modern
| java desktop UI's. However, Swing can be taken really
| _really_ far - just look at IntelliJ and friends (most
| people don 't even realize they're Swing UI's).
|
| With that said - most modern applications are webapps for
| good reasons. Making native apps sucks for a lot of
| reasons - including all the random OS-specific behavior
| you have to work around, specific versions of native OS
| libraries, etc.
|
| Building for the web browser means, without any extra
| effort, you app works on all operating systems, and it
| works exactly the same. That's a pretty good sell to
| anyone trying to make a modern application that's mostly
| just a front-end UI for an API...
| duped wrote:
| I remember UIs causing BSODs, horrible crashes, and
| corrupting files too.
| [deleted]
| emchammer wrote:
| It's not just browsers, though. I have to scroll harder in
| News.app than in other MacOS applications. Real question:
| Why do designers do this?
| winrid wrote:
| Webkit has lots of "advanced" flags. We should add this as
| one!
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Jesus. As a visually impaired person who needs to scroll almost
| line by line, this is horrible.
| ibz wrote:
| Reminds me of Slackware Live AKA SLAX and my days carrying a
| mini-CD with it wherever I went. Beautiful times.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Does it come with sources and can it compile/produce a new
| distribution of itself? So I could modify the sources just a
| little bit and get a new version by executing a command like
| 'make' etc. ?
| andreldm wrote:
| In their home page they state: "We make MiniOS beautiful so that
| you can enjoy using it every day and for any task. We pay great
| attention to every detail in the operating system", and there are
| mentions to Mandriva, Debian, even Fluxbox, nowhere Xfce is
| mentioned, it's almost like they are implying the aforementioned
| qualities are their merit alone.
| hk1337 wrote:
| I remember running Linux on a floppy disk back in the 90s. Used
| it as a NAT between the school network and my computer(s) in my
| room.
|
| Pretty cool to see the functionality increase with portability.
| Although, floppy disk space is significantly less than a USB
| drive.
| gpribeiro wrote:
| Coyote Linux, maybe? I used it at home in the beginning of the
| 2000s.
| rzzzt wrote:
| There's a famous single floppy router distribution:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project
|
| LGR has a video on a PC-based appliance (a wireless access
| point) where the "firmware" source was a walled-off 3.5"
| drive with a floppy inside. That one ran DR-DOS however:
| https://youtu.be/DOkapxbW93g
| hk1337 wrote:
| I believe that was it but Coyote Linux sounds familiar too.
| I think it perhaps used that distribution.
| megatoaster wrote:
| Reminds me of the days I used to carry a ton of live ISOs on me
| all the time.
|
| SliTaz might have been my favorite. TIL initial release was 2008.
| kwijibob wrote:
| For projects like this the first thing I like to look at is a
| ChangeLog. That gives you a sense of the momentum.
|
| If you click on the "News" menu item, you need to have Telegram
| app installed. :(
| O1111OOO wrote:
| I love this. I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a
| year or two (Netbook, load to RAM, save changes to USB). It was
| the most comfortable I ever felt using a computer. I used my
| laptop's HD as a pure data drive for large files only.
|
| Puppy encrypted the entire OS on USB. So it would boot fine but
| needed to be decrypted during the boot process.
|
| It contained all my apps, system settings and smaller files
| (docs, html, passwords, personal docs, etc) that I decided to
| save in the encrypted OS/USB.
|
| The laptop's mounted HD contained the larger stuff... tons of
| videos, pics, etc.. basically all the stuff I didn't really need
| to protect/encrypt.
|
| Someone could steal the laptop and I wouldn't care (all that
| large stuff is always backed up too on externals). Someone could
| steal the USB and they'd have to know it was a bootable,
| encrypted USB. Even so, they'd also need to know how to decrypt
| on boot. I felt so safe even when traveling.
|
| I could also plug my USB into any laptop and BOOM! ready to go:-)
| It was like a plug-n-play super-power.
|
| I saw MiniOS listed here and I immediately thought of my old
| Puppy setup. Looking forward to giving this OS a spin. I hope it
| considers my use case in their thinking (though I'm sure I can
| tweak it easily to fulfill my needs).
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a year or
| two
|
| If it was so good why did you stop?
|
| I used Puppy too a while ago but found that once I wanted to
| run something that the Puppy guys hadn't packaged that it was a
| bit more work to install things. That's probably not the case
| now that there is a Debian based Pup, perhaps I should consider
| trying again.
| O1111OOO wrote:
| > If it was so good why did you stop?
|
| This was maybe 14 years ago. I sold the netbook and started
| using Windows full time again. I was still in this middle
| state between using Linux and Windows - going back and forth
| between the two.
|
| When I decided the leave Windows completely (Windows 10
| spyware release summer/2015), I settled on a full-featured
| distro. I did some serious homework, a bit of distro-hopping
| and finally settled on Linux Mint Cinnamon.
|
| You are right, sometimes (often) installing must have apps on
| Puppy was a challenge - this was a factor now that I was a
| full-time Linux user.
|
| As a full time (still newbie user), I wanted access to every
| tool in the Linux world in the easiest way possible. I didn't
| want to hit a wall that might cause me to consider using
| Windows again.
| tombh wrote:
| Puppy was what got me into Linux! An old laptop was struggling
| with Windows and Puppy just breathed the most amazing fresh and
| sprightly life into it. That was over 15 years ago and I've
| used Linux everyday since.
| O1111OOO wrote:
| > Puppy just breathed the most amazing fresh and sprightly
| life into it.
|
| Yes! This was it exactly. Running Puppy in RAM on my old
| netbook was amazing:-)
| clnq wrote:
| I'm probably going to make some Linux desktop guys mad, but the
| page says "Attention to detail" and then proceeds to show very
| many desktop window screenshots where the styles are very
| inconsistent. Font sizes, margins around elements, menu bar
| styles, title bar styles and naming conventions, one of the
| windows has an application icon in the title, but only one, the
| icon sizes are very different. What's the point of saying
| "attention to detail" and then showing this?
| amelius wrote:
| Apparently, those are not the important details.
| liotier wrote:
| Indeed - different classes of users will have different
| perceptions. I never understood why anyone would feel ruffled
| by different applications using different UI libraries...
| somethingAlex wrote:
| It just seems odd in this context given they are willfully
| compiling these screenshots together, displaying them
| prominently, and saying they pay attention to details. What
| details are they trying to highlight here, if not the UI
| details?
|
| In general the UI doesn't even look good. It's just a bunch
| of unflattering grey.
| subarctic wrote:
| took me a second to figure out if it was min iOS or mini OS
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| What I would like to see is a brief discussion of why one should
| use MiniOS instead of, say Puppy, Slitaz, Tiny Core, etc. I might
| try it out anyway.
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(page generated 2023-10-04 23:00 UTC)