Next Previous Contents

18. Appendix A - Survey about Micro Linuxes

Because of their small or non-existent footprint, micro-Linuxes are especially suited to run on laptops -- particularly if you use a company-provided laptop running Windows9x/NT. Or for installation purposes using another non Linux machine. There are several micro Linux distributions out there that boot from one or two floppies and run off a ramdisk.

See http://www.linuxhq.com or http://www.txdirect.net/users/mdfranz/tinux.html for details. You may find a FAQ and a mailing list about boot-floppies at http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~sr1/boot-floppies/faq.html . Also a BootDisk-HOWTO is available. Thanks to Matthew D. Franz maintainer of Trinux for this tips and collecting most of the following URLs. See also the content of Console/Mini Distributions at FreshMeat.

  1. MuLinux by Michele Andreoli
  2. tomsrtbt http://www.toms.net/~toehser/rb/ "The most Linux on one floppy. (distribution or panic disk)." by Tom Oehser
  3. Trinux http://www.trinux.org "A Linux Security Toolkit" by Matthew D. Franz
  4. LRP "Linux Router Project" http://www.psychosis.com/linux-router/
  5. hal91 http://home.sol.no/~okolaas/hal91.html
  6. floppyfw http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ by Thomas Lundquist
  7. minilinux http://alberti.crs4.it/softw are/mini-linux/ (seems no more valid) or http://www.kiarchive.ru/pub/linux/mini-linux/
  8. monkey http://www.spsselib.hiedu.cz/monkey/docs/english.htm
  9. DLX http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/usr/h93/h9301726/dlx.html by Erich Boem
  10. C-RAMDISK http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/images/
  11. BABEL http://celsius-software.hypermart.net/babel/ "A mini-distribution to run games"
  12. Xdenu http://xdenu.tcm.hut.fi/ , quotating Alan Cox: "Xdenu is a small distribution program that installs as a set of DOS zips onto a DOS partition and gives you a complete X11 client workstation."
  13. LOAF http://www.ecks.org/loaf/
  14. pocket-linux http://pocket-linux.coven.vmh.net/
  15. FLUF http://www.upce.cz/~kolo/fluf.htm
  16. YARD http://www.croftj.net/~fawcett/yard/
  17. TLinux http://members.xoom.com/ror4/tlinux/
  18. ODL http://linux.apostols.org/guru/wen/
  19. SmallLinux by Steven Gibson http://smalllinux.netpedia.net/ Three disk micro-distribution of Linux and utilities. Based on kernel 1.2.11. Root disk is ext2 format and has fdisk and mkfs.ext2 so that a harddisk install can be done. Useful to boot up on old machines with less than 4MB of RAM.
  20. cLIeNUX by Rick Hohensee client-use-oriented Linux distribution ftp://ftp.blueznet.com /pub/colorg
  21. linux-lite by Paul Gortmaker for very small systems with less than 2MB RAM and 10MB harddisk space (1.x.x kernel) http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel
  22. See also the packages at MetaLab formerly known as SunSite http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/recovery/!INDEX.html and the Boot-Disk-HOWTO
  23. You may also consider some of the boot floppies provided by various distributions falling into this category, e.g. the boot/rescue floppy of Debian/GNU Linux.
  24. If you like to build your own flavour of a boot floppy you may do so manually, as described in the BootDisk-HOWTO or using some helper tools, for instance mkrboot (provided at least as a Debian/GNU Linux package) or pcinitrd, which is part of the PCMCIA-CS package by David Hinds.
  25. Also you might try to build your Linux system on a ZIP drive. This is described in the ZIP-Install-mini-HOWTO.

Next Previous Contents