[HN Gopher] Damn Small Linux 2024
___________________________________________________________________
Damn Small Linux 2024
Author : abbbi
Score : 317 points
Date : 2024-02-01 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.damnsmalllinux.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.damnsmalllinux.org)
| anthk wrote:
| I'd put this dillo fork:
|
| https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo
|
| On games, sgt-puzzles and bsdgames fit well, among
| nethack/slashem, DCSS and OFC Frotz too plus a few libre games
| (Spiritwrak and such). Slashem+BSDGames+3 adventures for Frotz
| would weight less than 20MB I think. Compressed, about 7.
|
| BTW, I'd ditch XMMS for Audacious; a Pentium 3/4 today would be
| more than enough to run it.
|
| BTW Visidata it's huge, use sc-im+Gnuplot.
|
| On browsers, felinks supports Gopher and Gemini too. Gopher has
| nice stuff as gopher://magical.fish, Gemini has similar places
| too.
| snvzz wrote:
| gopherus is a decent, low resource, console-able, gopher
| client.
| anthk wrote:
| sacc too; but felinks provides Gemini.
| montroser wrote:
| I remember DSL fondly. It was a marvel then, and maybe now in
| retrospect even moreso -- that so much functionality could be
| packed into such a small footprint.
|
| Conceptually the need still exists today, even if the whole
| landscape has changed in the meantime. I'll look forward to
| trying this out!
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Fantastic to have another option with modern tools! great work
| that will be appreciated by many. Between this, Puppy, and Tiny
| Core Linux so much old hardware can be put to potential use. I'd
| also mention Finnix as an excellent rescue image solution. Any
| other awesome projects for limited hardware and Linux use that
| should be more well known?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I'd say Alpine is in that category, and depending on how you
| count "Linux", OpenWrt too
| seemaze wrote:
| I've been quite happy with Alpine Linux. You can build it up to
| suit your needs for desktop, server, embedded or containers,
| but will run quite speedily on any supported arch from a few
| tens of MB of memory. The APK package manager is pleasant and
| quick, and the package list is quite extensive.
| Atreiden wrote:
| Wow I've never heard of someone running Alpine as a desktop
| OS before. How is the experience without glibc? What are you
| using for a DE? I'd thought X relied on glibc
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I've used Alpine Linux also but I found it very unintuitive
| for a general Linux distro (I used to like configuring things
| like Alpine but I've lost the spark for it and now I just
| want something light that works. DSL used to be like that.)
| sgc wrote:
| For rescue I have used Slax, which is very convenient as well.
| ogurechny wrote:
| > so much old hardware
|
| Not so much, actually. When you aim for anything that resembles
| modern "desktop computing" (maybe with at least some "web
| browsing"), you are limited to decent hardware configurations
| from last 15 years or so. Yes, you can show to your grand-
| grand-grandkids how it really was back in the days once, but
| you are not going to study the splash screens while programs
| initialize, or wait for each image to appear for a couple of
| seconds when skimming trough an archive, or watch page load
| progress bars move in the browser. But with that decent
| hardware, you almost always can install bog standard modern
| Debian with an ascetic desktop, and have much less support
| issues than with specialized system. It'll be the same Linux
| anyway.
|
| Although it is possible that it won't work for some top
| performance purely 32 bit CPUs, because non 64 bit builds are
| certainly out of fashion today, even though some 32 bit
| distributions still exist.
| userabchn wrote:
| The computer I use most of the time is a 19 year old (2005)
| laptop. I run Debian with LXDE and Firefox on it and,
| although you have to be a little bit patient with some
| websites, I am generally still very satisfied with it.
| ogurechny wrote:
| I suppose it's a desktop replacement model with desktop
| Pentium 4 and whole 2 GB of memory which cost thousands of
| dollars? Regular Pentium Ms of the era get dangerously
| close to netbook Atoms in performance, which is certainly
| the bottom of the barrel.
| catherinecodes wrote:
| Linux From Scratch (LFS)[1] is well known but doesn't get a lot
| of fanfare. It was designed as a learning tool, but the avenues
| for exploration are endless.
|
| 1: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
| bombcar wrote:
| I've always felt Gentoo was a decent cross between LFS and a
| "real" distro like Debian - much of the install is similar to
| LFS with some hand-holding, and the end result is a system
| that has package management tools.
| catherinecodes wrote:
| Absolutely! I recommend Gentoo in a separate thread below.
|
| LFS has the topic of package management covered quite
| nicely I think[1]. They describe the contraints and
| approaches that might be possible, and what the real world
| solutions to those are (PRM, DEB, et al).
|
| There have even been some package managers designed (or at
| least discussions of what the design would look like) for
| LFS explicitly over the years, but none seemed to have come
| to fruition, and I can't find any links to them.
|
| 1: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/9.0-systemd/ch
| apte...
| anthk wrote:
| Also by using Musl and Alpine as a base the amount of software
| you can put in 700MB it's huge.
|
| With 700MB, IceWM and ZZZFM you could fit half a CD even with all
| the X.org drivers installed and you could fit Abiword, Gnumeric,
| Seamonkey, Dillo and so on with ease.
|
| Offering an alternative with Linux-Libre will be interesting too,
| as often the Libre kernel works faster than the vanilla one, and
| legacy computers have all the drivers working. Propietary drivers
| won't work anymore such as Nvidia which some of the older ones
| might not even compile with DKMS.
| znpy wrote:
| 700mb used to host the whole ubuntu desktop for many years
| though
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| I don't know if Musl is worth the hassle if one is only
| interested in the reduced size. I see the point if you have
| everything statically linked, but with dynamic linking, you
| have glibc sitting there just once with a few MB, and you don't
| have to tackle all the issues that can arise when using Musl
| (e.g., DNS).
|
| Alpine's compressed container image is nowadays something like
| 3 MB, okay, that's very small, but I wish they had an 8 MB
| glibc version. On the other hand, there is debian-slim, but
| it's not as good as Alpine when it comes down to stripping down
| the size, it still weighs in at around 30 MB. I'm still using
| it, though, although I think it could be smaller.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I run Alpine on a desktop and a couple of laptops (low-end
| ex-chromebooks, one of them via postmarketos), and it's not
| really a hassle IME. Granted, I'm not doing a lot of building
| things from source (or if I do it's in docker and distro is
| easy to change) so maybe I'm just avoiding the pain, but if
| your uses are covered by officially packaged software it Just
| Works(tm).
| lemme_tell_ya wrote:
| I played around with DSL a lot back in 2009 or so, it ran great
| on old PCs I salvaged from the garbage.
|
| > Hats off to Puppy Linux for staying one of the few that still
| offer a full desktop environment in a small size.
|
| Don't forget SliTaz too, it's still tiny:
|
| > Root filesystem taking up about 100 MB and ISO image of less
| than 40 MB.
|
| https://www.slitaz.org/en/about/
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| Woah, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time!
|
| It says that it fits on a CD, but how about the other
| requirements? e.g. how much RAM is needed, and what kind of
| instruction set does the CPU need to support? is a 386 enough or
| do you need 486/586/686 level instructions?
| ls65536 wrote:
| I got it running as a VM guest on QEMU+KVM, exposing only a 486
| CPU profile with 256 MB RAM, and it was still usable (with
| terminal, file manager, and some light web browsing). Looking
| at the system's memory usage though, it appears that going much
| lower than about 200 MB RAM would probably make it quite
| difficult to use (at least without relying on swap, which could
| make it even more miserable depending on the device being used
| there).
| mike_hock wrote:
| That only fakes some cpuid flags. KVM cannot blacklist
| specific instructions or emulate idiosyncrasies of specific
| vintage CPUs.
| npteljes wrote:
| It was an abandoned project for a long time, that's why the
| memory is old[0]. I remember because I was looking for
| something very light to boot up an old chunky armada laptop,
| and I ended up on Puppy Linux, even though I wanted to use DSL
| because of the cool name.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux#Versions_and_...
| pushedx wrote:
| I used DSL back around when it was released (and 64 MiB flash
| drives were common) to get around my school's network filtering.
| I think this was one of the reasons they hired new IT staff the
| following year, because the technique caught on even with the
| non-nerdy crowd.
| brnt wrote:
| Reminds me of cramming an installed QuakeII on a 64MB USB
| stick, and quickly booting it up on a few library computers
| when we had an hour off in high school. They blocked
| installers, but not 'portable' executables or network access.
| montecarl wrote:
| Yes, this brings back such memories for me too! I also used to
| boot from removable media to use linux on school computers. The
| librarian assumed I was some kind of computer hacker and
| reported me to the schools IT admin. I thought I was in
| trouble. Instead he took me under his wing and had me work with
| him after school on some fun projects! Really helped me
| understand that the skills I was learning were valuable and
| that I had an aptitude for it.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Kudos to the admin, that's a much better way to handle such a
| situation than what I've sadly read many stories about, where
| the IT dept seemingly takes mild cleverness by students as a
| personal insult and punishes them.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Cool! DSL replaced LNX-BBC for me some time in 2005. Glad to see
| development has resumed.
|
| In a similar vein, I think there's a Slackware-based release of
| Slax again!
|
| (posting this from a ThinkPad T61 running Slackware 15)
| metalspot wrote:
| > keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills
|
| while i like this idea in theory, in practice the energy
| efficiency and lower electricity costs of newer hardware mean
| that in terms of both cost and environmental impact it would
| probably be better to recycle the old hardware and buy something
| new in most cases.
| tw04 wrote:
| >recycle the old hardware and buy something new in most cases.
|
| Completely agree, other than nobody is willing to recycle the
| hardware in any environmentally friendly way. So "recycle"
| pretty much just means "send it to some poor country who is
| perfectly fine polluting their ecosystem to pull anything
| valuable from the junk".
| anthk wrote:
| Building and shipping new machines requires far more
| envionmental related costs.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Plus just earning the money to buy the new hardware is bad
| enough.
| makerdiety wrote:
| So, for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to
| go backwards? Stop working and stuff?
| anthk wrote:
| We _did_ work with Jabber /Email and 512MB/1GB of RAM
| running similar chat clients, desktop environments (XFCE
| 4.6 was much faster than 4.16), video players and office
| suites.
|
| Nowadays to do the same today you need 10X the resources
| just for a chat application.
|
| And by 'chat' I don't mean 'irc'. Jabber, embedded
| Youtube URL's, inline LaTeX documents...
| znpy wrote:
| It really depends. Computers have got very efficient in the
| last ten years.
|
| Throwing away a five years old chromebook because google
| decided they don't want to support it is very different than
| throwing away a Pentium4 (more of a heating machine than a
| processor)
| bachmeier wrote:
| I just checked Wikipedia, and was surprised to see the original
| DSL only had releases for about 3.5 years.
|
| > Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in
| 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002
|
| If you go all the way back to 2002, 50 MB for an old computer
| wasn't that small. I bought a new computer with 192 MB of RAM as
| late as 2005. My 32-bit, $400 discount laptop from 2009 has 4 GB
| of RAM, so 700 MB is reasonable.
| anthk wrote:
| 50MB for a pocket OS was perfecly small. Compare it to a 6-7-8
| CD release of SuSE, Debian or Mandrake. Or the 700MB Knoppix CD
| back in the day. You could download DSL in reasonable time.
| maxmalkav wrote:
| IIRC 50MB was not the space needed in RAM but the size of the
| whole basic installation on disk
| pimlottc wrote:
| I remember running Linux Router Project [0] on a 1.44mb floppy
| disk back in the late 90s! Of course, it didn't have a GUI, but
| I don't think you could even fit the linux kernel on a single
| floppy disk today.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project
| fs_tab wrote:
| Technically, you can compile the 6.8 kernel using "make
| tinyconfig" (which results in a 509kb image). Of course, this
| isn't usable on actual hardware, but it is a good baseline to
| build off.
| mobilio wrote:
| In 2000 i was using FloppyFW for same reason.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Was that reason running IP Masq to share a 56k modem
| connection? :)
| leeman2016 wrote:
| You're right. 50 MB used to be big back then.
|
| I remember my rig back in around 2002 had only 96 MB of RAM. I
| used to get the best out of it using Puppy and Slax distros.
| e12e wrote:
| Iirc DSL used to fit on mini/business card CDs. No real
| motivation to get much smaller - unless fitting on a floppy.
| Then for a while there were small usb drives that were
| interesting, and with better options for persistent user data
| than r/w CDs.
| Dunedan wrote:
| Aren't you mistaking disk space for memory size? Available disk
| space in 2002 was much larger.
| saltcured wrote:
| Back in 2002, DSL was already a reaction to the CD-ROM based
| distributions which had bloated so much compared to the early
| days.
|
| One of the first "approachable" Linux distributions circa 1993
| was the Soft Landing Systems (SLS) 2-floppy disk set. One held
| the bootloader and kernel, the other the root filesystem. The
| kernel disk was swapped out during the boot process, so after
| that you only needed to leave the root system floppy in. Then,
| you could use a not uncommon second floppy drive for removable
| data disks. The SLS system was text console only, but I think
| (?) had an editor and gcc.
|
| My first persistent installation, Slackware, was on a system
| with about 8 MB RAM and a 40 MB HDD dedicated to Linux. This
| had X Windows, Emacs, multiple dev tools, and modem based
| internet.
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| The "damn small" linux has 2 windows managers and 3 browsers.
|
| Doesn't look like it's small, looks like it's a collection of
| things the author enjoys.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| And how much space do those packages take?
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| Take 3x what they could take.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Not really; the 3 browsers are dillo, links2, and badwolf.
| Of those, dillo and links2 are <10MB each including
| dependencies, while badwolf uses webkit which AFAICT is on
| the order of ~100MB. It's not practical to only have dillo
| or links2, so what it "could" take is >100MB for one
| browser, or >120MB for 3, and 120 is less than 3x100.
| nlunbeck wrote:
| > All the applications are chosen for their functionality,
| small size, and low dependencies
|
| I wouldn't mind a few extra mb of software if it improves my
| overall user experience. The nice thing about DSL is that its
| slim despite having a pretty comprehensive app suite.
| warner25 wrote:
| I also raised an eyebrow at the three web browsers, but then I
| was thinking that it's quite likely that none of them are
| reliable for opening a modern webpage, so users might have to
| routinely try more than one.
|
| I'm more amused by the inclusion of a GUI application for SCP
| and FTP. As someone who uses a full-featured desktop Linux
| distro as my daily driver, and uses SCP on a daily basis, I've
| never felt the need for anything but the CLI for that.
|
| Also a number of games?
|
| To be fair, the page states that "The new goal of DSL is to
| pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small
| enough to fit on a single CD," so it is explicitly more about
| showcasing a collection of lightweight applications than it is
| about providing the smallest distro.
| yellowapple wrote:
| The original DSL had a similar redundancies in its available
| applications. Even more so for DSL-N, which was free to break
| the "under 50MB" rule but still stayed remarkably tiny and
| efficient. That was one of the things that made DSL so cool: "I
| can get multiple browsers, a full office suite, multimedia
| tools, and even games on a bootable disk that fits in my
| wallet? Hell yeah!".
|
| Program sizes have ballooned by an order of magnitude or more,
| so unfortunately so must DSL's target size if it expects to
| retain feature-parity, but it's still a lot of bang for one's
| disk-space buck by the looks of it.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Holy fucking shit my childhood.
|
| Damn Small Linux was my first introduction to Linux because it
| was the only thing I could download in ~4 hours on dialup without
| hogging the phones all day long.
|
| I will have to fire this up and have a damn good time.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Wow, this submission has fantastic timing for me.
|
| I have been looking for a minimal linux distribution to run under
| qemu, so I've been shopping in this small distro market.
|
| I really like 'tiny core' best so far in terms of functionality /
| size, but I would love to not have to backbend to get it to
| persist to disk.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Wow, this is crazy. I came across the DSL website last night
| while trying to figure out how to compile a minimal Linux kernel
| myself, and now here it is on HN! I used DSL back in high school
| when it was new.
|
| As a side note, why does compiling Linux have to be so... obtuse?
| It just stops for me after several minutes of building out
| objects with no explanation.
| codethief wrote:
| Are you looking to build just a minimal kernel or also a
| minimal distribution? (Which is what I happened to be thinking
| about last night :)) In the latter case, do you know any good
| resources about that topic?
| akkartik wrote:
| Depending on how minimal a distribution you want, a few years
| ago I had a way to take a single ELF binary created by my
| computing stack built up from machine code
| (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) and package it up with just
| a linux kernel and syslinux (whatever _that_ is) to create a
| bootable disk image I could then ship to a cloud server
| (https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode, though I don't use
| Linode anymore these days) and run on a VPS to create a truly
| minimal webserver. If this seems at all relevant I'd be happy
| to answer questions or help out.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Yocto, Linux From Scratch (LFS) and buildroot for embedded
| systems come to mind.
|
| https://www.yoctoproject.org/
|
| https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
|
| https://buildroot.org/
| eKKiM wrote:
| Some resources i used in the past are Linux From Scratch
| https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ and Yocto
| https://www.yoctoproject.org/ However i have no idea how up
| to date these are.
| codethief wrote:
| Thanks! I've dabbled with both projects but I've found them
| rather hard to approach and learn (generic lessons) from
| how to set up a distro.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > As a side note, why does compiling Linux have to be so...
| obtuse? It just stops for me after several minutes of building
| out objects with no explanation.
|
| That's... odd. Does it break if you just use the default `make
| defconfig` configuration? Because pruning what's built in
| without breaking it is hard-ish IME but it shouldn't just fail
| silently. Or... when you say "It just stops" you don't by any
| chance mean that it finished and you just need to find the
| actual binar(y|ies) it produced?
| charcircuit wrote:
| It shouldn't ever stop for more than maybe 10 seconds. Try
| using a task manager to see what it's running. I think some
| steps take a few GB of RAM, so is it possible you exhausted
| your memory?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > As a side note, why does compiling Linux have to be so...
| obtuse? It just stops for me after several minutes of building
| out objects with no explanation.
|
| The Linux kernel compilation scripts use the lowest-common-
| denominator toolset: make/sed/awk. It would be awesome to
| rewrite them to use Python or some other higher-level language,
| but then it wouldn't run on a Japanese supercomputer built in
| 1986 and long-ago mothballed, and you never know when you'll
| need that!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Downloading at ~100KB/s... hitting the front page of HN is
| probably a good usecase for bittorrent.
| meonkeys wrote:
| Mine went fast. Happy to share:
|
| magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6285b37e9f968526f953c714993ff2f76c6a4d29&dn
| =dsl-2024.alpha.iso&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3
| A6969
|
| Hopefully that magnet URI works. This is the first time I've
| tried to create one. Hopefully the tracker works too, I seem to
| be getting intermittent "Connection failed" errors from it. If
| anyone already knows how to properly serve torrents, please
| school me. :-)
|
| Size is 698126336 bytes. Checksum is at
| https://damnsmalllinux.org/download/dsl-2024.alpha.iso.md5.t...
| (looks like they only have an MD5 checksum posted).
| ctrlaltdylan wrote:
| What a throwback.
|
| This was the only distro that I could fit on a memory stick,
| which were novel at the time (and memory was $$$ if you can
| believe that).
|
| I stuck this into a machine I made from parts I found at our
| recycling center, and threw them in a shoebox.
|
| Good times.
| foxmoss wrote:
| Love this distro, its the only one that loads fast on web x86
| emulation. Sad that they're upping the size but 700mb is still
| leagues smaller then most other distros.
| cromka wrote:
| Interesting fact is that DSL used to be 50MB because that's how
| big a business-card sized CDs were. And yes, there used to be
| business-card sized CDs.
| glenstein wrote:
| A different way of saying the same thing: business-card sized
| _and shaped_.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| those used to make the most horrible noise when you actually
| use them
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| They weren't too great with vertically mounted drives or
| slot-loading drives, either.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| they werent too great period :)
| myself248 wrote:
| Only if you had one of those fancy high-speed drives. They
| were nice and quiet at 2x.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| I hadn't seen the rectangular ones (just the chorded circle
| ones) until I bought a bunch and received these:
|
| https://twitter.com/systems_glitch/status/169651986595858851.
| ..
| leetharris wrote:
| Wow, I completely forgot about this! You just teleported me
| back in time for a minute there.
|
| For anyone else interested:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card
| ok123456 wrote:
| You still see them sometimes for drivers.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Those are slightly different - mini CDs. The ones the OP was
| talking about were a weird oblong shape.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| How could a CD not be round?
| itsmartapuntocm wrote:
| Only the inner part where you can draw a circle contains
| actual data. The rest is just blank, but as long as it's
| balanced it works just fine.
| markstos wrote:
| I had a copy of DSL on one of those!
| S201 wrote:
| I still have a stack of these lying around. I used them in high
| school for carrying a live Linux distro in my wallet to use on
| the school computers since the BIOSs were too old to support
| booting from USB. Needless to say, the school district IT
| department was not happy with me.
| jbaber wrote:
| The DSL in my wallet saved my bacon once when I was scheduled
| to teach a one evening intro to unix tools class in a room with
| all Windows machines.
| haunter wrote:
| A truly damn small Linux is the xwoaf rebuild project 4.0
| https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html
|
| >The forth version of xwoaf-rebuild is containing a lot of
| applications contained in only two binaries: busybox and
| mcb_xawplus. You get xcalc, xcalendar, xfilemanager, xminesweep,
| chimera, xed, xsetroot, xcmd, xinit, menu, jwm, desklaunch, rxvt,
| xtet42, torsmo, djpeg, xban2, text2pdf, Xvesa, xsnap, xmessage,
| xvl, xtmix, pupslock, xautolock and minimp3 via mcb_xawplus. And
| you get ash, basename, bunzip2, busybox, bzcat, cat, chgrp,
| chmod, chown, chroot, clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname,
| dmesg, du, echo, env, extlinux, false, fdisk, fgrep, find, free,
| getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hostname, id, ifconfig,
| init, insmod, kill, killall, klogd, ln, loadkmap, logger, login,
| losetup, ls, lsmod, lzmacat, mesg, mkdir, mke2fs, mkfs.ext2,
| mkfs.ext3, mknod, mkswap, mount, mv, nslookup, openvt, passwd,
| ping, poweroff, pr, ps, pwd, readlink, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir,
| rmmod, route, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync,
| syslogd, tail, tar, test, top, touch, tr, true, tty, udhcpc,
| umount, uname, uncompress, unlzma, unzip, uptime, wc, which,
| whoami, yes, zcat via busybox. On top you get extensive help
| system, install scripts, mount scripts, configure scripts etc.
|
| 2.1mb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo
|
| Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that's very dated
| vardump wrote:
| "2.1mb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo"
|
| 2.1 MB installed? The ISO file seemed to be just 1716224 bytes
| (1.7MB).
| haunter wrote:
| I was checking the final version (xwoaf_rebuild4.iso), that
| is 2205696 bytes
| moffkalast wrote:
| So uh, who's gonna be first to get it running on a Pi Pico?
| vardump wrote:
| No one, unless you're using a CPU emulator or a JIT with an
| SPI RAM. RP2040 doesn't have memory protection / virtual
| memory capability and has only 264 kB (or so) RAM.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Pico is a microcontroller whose Cortex-M0+ cores lack a
| memory management unit for virtual memory (considered
| essential for a full-fledged OS like Linux). But can run
| FreeRTOS on it...memory usages are 236 bytes for the
| scheduler, 76 bytes + queue storage area for each queue, and
| 64 bytes plus task stack size for each task, plus 5 to 10
| KBytes of ROM.[1]
|
| [1] https://freertos.org/FAQMem.html
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah I figured there might be a rub somewhere otherwise it
| would already be a thing, but since it's technically an ARM
| it sounded vaguely promising. What about a 32 bit build? I
| think those used to be able to work with without virtual
| addresses.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/190350/mmu-less-
| ker...
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| aha, and this reminds me about mClinux [1] which targets
| microcontrollers without a MMU. I installing it on 2005
| iPod Classic 5G, and was able to then put a gameboy
| emulator on it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CClinux
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Though mClinux project seems dead, however the key
| component of that is a ELF to bFLT (binary flat)
| converter [1] for no-mmu Linux targets, which is alive on
| github [2].
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120301074213/https://re
| tired.b... [2] https://github.com/uclinux-dev/elf2flt
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| There's also inferno, which is more or less a full unix-
| like that can run on the pico (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37393993 ) and on the
| Teensy and some other microcontrollers (
| https://dboddie.gitlab.io/inferno-diary/index.html )
| rzzzt wrote:
| ELKS supported MMU-less operation on 8088 and 80286
| machines, but I don't think an ARM port exists:
| https://github.com/ghaerr/elks
| gorkish wrote:
| The popular way to shorehorn modern linux onto a MMU-less
| microcontroller is to build a a RISC V system emulator and
| run uClinux on that; you can also emulate the MMU and run
| regular kernels if you have sufficient resources. It has
| been done on ESP32 with sufficient RAM; Pico would need
| additional hardware though in the form of something like
| QSPI RAM, and of course it would be very slow.
| mathiasgredal wrote:
| Not possible, unless you want to do it using an emulator and
| external memory. The lowest you can go for Linux is probably
| an ESP32:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230515075935/http://wiki.osll..
| ..
|
| https://github.com/jcmvbkbc/linux-
| xtensa/commits/xtensa-6.4-...
| jrockway wrote:
| You don't need an ESP32. Someone made an AVR port:
| https://bit-tech.net/news/tech/cpus/linux-atmel-
| microcontrol...
|
| https://bit-tech.net/news/tech/cpus/linux-atmel-
| microcontrol...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12537653
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I think it's possible to get Windows 7 Ultimate down below 2GB,
| so a comparatively impressive Linux build should definitely be
| a lot smaller.
| abbbi wrote:
| windows PE is way smaller, boots live around ~250 MB in size.
| Of course without any namely applications.
| k__ wrote:
| If it can run a browser, I'm sold.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Lynx perhaps but otherwise I think you're a few orders of
| magnitude off.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| wow! In the same league of mLinux (muLinux). I remember back in
| the day, running a full X11 environment with only two floppies.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I seem to remember formatting a 1.44 MB floppy to fit more
| data on it, and it might have been for this.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Only 2.2.26 kernel tho so that's very dated
|
| The whole thing is dated; that looks like more of a
| retrocomputing project (mostly) than an updated version. I
| mean, busybox 1.00 is probably fine for what it is, but it's
| not exactly new. (Note that this is a clarification but not a
| criticism; having played with things like "how old of a distro
| can I shove in docker and run on a current kernel", I certainly
| _support_ retrocomputing, I just think we should acknowledge
| that that 's what we're doing)
| haunter wrote:
| Yeah agreed. Given the toolchain source is available I wonder
| how low we can go with a modern kernel and the newest busybox
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I don't think you can use the old toolchain; newer
| kernel+busybox are unlikely to build with that old of a
| compiler. Although, following the build steps with modern
| sources and toolchain would be an interesting exercise.
| haunter wrote:
| >Although, following the build steps with modern sources
| and toolchain would be an interesting exercise.
|
| Might do that this weekend
| FreeFull wrote:
| It would be rather difficult to fit any newer linux kernel
| onto a floppy, together with all the other software.
| hackneyedruse wrote:
| This article says
|
| > The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop
| distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single
| CD, or a hard limit of 700MB.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| FWIW this subthread is about the xwoaf distro, not DSL;
| the projects have different goals
| Medox wrote:
| The desktop reminds me of TinyCore Linux, although bigger by
| 15-20 MB.
|
| Fun fact: It was developed by Robert Shingledecker, who was
| previously the lead developer of Damn Small Linux.
| devsda wrote:
| Around 2009-10s when keeping a dedicated usb drive for live
| images was relatively expensive (for me), I had a small
| partition with tinycore installed as a recovery os alongside
| windows & another full distro.
|
| I never had to use tinycore for recovery but it gave me
| enough confidence to keep messing with new packages and
| drivers.
|
| Due to its small footprint the boot times almost felt like
| instant on.
| chrsw wrote:
| I like Fluxbox, it's really simple and doesn't get in your way.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| AbiWord seems like an odd choice for a word processor-- it seems
| to be virtually obsolete.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Is there anything newer that isn't absurdly bloated?
| da_chicken wrote:
| Doubtful. TED's last stable release was in 2013, and that's
| the lightweight one I'm familiar with.
|
| There's KWrite, but I'd be surprised if that were less
| bloated than AbiWord.
|
| Markdown text might be fine, but I wouldn't expect markdown
| to PDF via pandoc to be particuarly "lightweight." There's
| the range of typesetting or desktop publishing stuff like
| TeXmacs, groff, or LyX, but I don't expect those to be
| particularly light, either. There's WordGrinder, a terminal
| based word processor, but I've never used that.
| ape4 wrote:
| A good choice to run a simple application in a container?
| signa11 wrote:
| high-end _CPUs_ have more _cache_ than that !
| Narishma wrote:
| Which high-end CPUs have 700 MB of cache?
| signa11 wrote:
| whoops sorry! i thought it was still around 50m or
| thereabouts...
| l33tman wrote:
| I had the Linux kernel and some simple user-space tools like
| busybox running on an embedded platform with 512 kB RAM and 2MB
| flash back in 1999! Those were fun times. To be honest 512 kb was
| possible but very on the limit, I think the product we launched
| with it had a few megs of RAM eventually. We had to invent a
| journalling flash filesystem as well in order to make it work in
| practice, something that didn't exist back then either. But Linux
| then was really a breakthrough compared to the horrible mess of
| embedded OSes that were needed otherwise to handle TCP/IP,
| filesystems and multitasking.
| xattt wrote:
| All the WRT54G(L) derivatives were an example of this
| minimalism, with some versions running on 2MB flash and 8MB
| RAM.
|
| The 512k is impressive.
| l33tman wrote:
| Yeah the 2/8 combo was probably what we went with in the
| product as well. The 512k was more like a shoehorned concept
| demo in an existing product.
|
| The next thing we did was make a version of our CPU with an
| MMU, designed to work optimally with Linux (the first version
| was on the uClinux concept, with a kernel without MMU support
| and user-space programs that couldn't rely on fork() or
| mmap() fully). After a year or 2 with MMU-less Linux, it was
| like heaven to be able to run on an MMU :)
| Dwedit wrote:
| For those who had to search it, "Badwolf" is a Webkit based
| browser.
| sylware wrote:
| badwolf... light?? It is a webkit based browser, come on...
| tbitrust wrote:
| What are some use cases of Damn Small Linux?
| harvie wrote:
| 666 MB iso
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| thank you for sharing, but surprised they are offering a direct
| download link instead of a torrent, they are bound to get
| slashdotted.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Damn small Linux was the first Linux I could actually use as a
| child/adolescent because the downloaded zip file included a copy
| of QEMU.exe (and a .BAT file to boot DSL) that I could use to get
| a taste of Linux with no prior experience, using a Windows
| computer. Growing up in Redmond WA, home of Microsoft, it felt
| very subversive to young me to use a non-windows operating
| system. I'm forever thankful for that seemingly random include in
| the download; I probably wouldn't have become the person I am
| without it.
| veganjay wrote:
| I was looking for a lightweight OS to run on old Asus Eee PC 1005
| HA, which uses a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 processor. I installed
| Void Linux (https://voidlinux.org/).
|
| I may give DSL 2024 a try and see how it compares.
| catherinecodes wrote:
| Void Linux is great for minimal installs. Gentoo fits the bill
| nicely too. Both allow for small init systems and, at least in
| the case of Gentoo, multiple bootloaders and initramfs tools.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Great memories of the original DSL. New one looks great at a
| glance, really nice collection of applications. Blown away they
| managed to fit all that on a CD. From the page, it sounds like
| they did a lot of work to make it happen.
|
| Really cool stuff. Might stick this on an old laptop when I get
| home.
| mrighele wrote:
| > DSL 2024 currently only ships with two window managers: Fluxbox
| and JWM. Both are lightweight, fairly intuitive, and easy to use.
|
| I wonder what they will move to once they have to start using
| Wayland. Is there a lightweight, user-friend, and stable
| compositor ? (My experience is that you can choose two, but not
| three).
| flykespice wrote:
| I remember this being one of my very first distros when I started
| using Linux, probably because of its very attractive name like
| many did here.
|
| However what moved me away from it was the sudden abandoment due
| to the fallout between a primary contributor and the project's
| leader, to which the former made the focal point on his
| distrowatch interview, he would later create his own distro
| called TinyCoreLinux.
|
| In my opinion this a fruitless attempt to restore any credibility
| that the project lead has lost after over a decade of negligence
| and abandoment.
| crznp wrote:
| > Dillo (super-light GUI browser)
|
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613
|
| I don't know if DSL has updated to use that version yet, but
| thanks again to rodarima for picking that up!
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