2012/11/26 Ciprian Dorin Craciun <[email protected]>: > On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 8:53 PM, Hugues Moretto-Viry > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Just because I'm really curious, I'm searching minimal GNU/Linux >> distributions with the following options: >> >> - x86_64 architecture >> - minimal installation >> - no default Desktop Environment >> - rolling release > > > I don't know which are rolling release and which aren't, also I > think most of them are 32 bit only, but below you can find some Linux > distributions I found closing to these requirements. (Of course I > didn't try any of them myself, but I've read about them). > > Boot from RO media, doesn't require a RW disk: > * http://alpinelinux.org/ -- would give it a closer look, I think > it's the most "mature"; > * http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/ -- nice idea, don't > know how "stable" it is; > > Could be made to work with RO media, but suitable for RW disk: > * http://www.slitaz.org/ -- tons of packages (old and new), but > the package manager is kind of buggy...; > * Ubuntu Core -- comes as a `tar.gz`, containing only the minimum > necessary tools to run Ubuntu; > > For embedded, but usable on x86: > * OpenWRT; > > But now about the feasibility of such an idea: > * I tend to agree with Hadrian Węgrzynowski, when he says it's > better to have a very stable "core" (kernel + basic tools), and then > maintain customized version of a few packages; > * I currently would just take the packages from a "mainstream" > stable distribution (like Debian), and replace their package manager > with something which extracts just some paths (like `/bin`, `/lib` and > ignores docs, man pages, etc.) > > Ciprian. > > P.S.: As someone remarked earlier it's unclear what you want such > a distribution for: (a) desktop usage, (b) rescue usage, (c) appliance > usage, (d) something else? >
I haven't followed this discussion so I'm sorry if have misunderstood what you are after. When I want to have a small distro for some specialized task I usually just combine the kernel with busybox to get something very simple and then I just compile and add whatever program I might need. If this is an option I could give you the url to the git repository I use that you can easily just checkout and run make in and it will give you a compiled kernel with a absolutly minimal cpio ramdisk containing only busybox and some scripts needed in order to boot. // Jens
