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I maintain Finnix, a system maintenance livecd. The first release was 0.03. The next release was 86.0. Why?

1) Why not?
2) See 1.
3) It had been 5 years between releases.

Finnix is currently at 92.0, and I've got to make a decision about version numbering soon. The reason is simple: "There Will Be No Finnix 95", for obvious reasons. I may just jump from 94 to 100.

I've noticed that, when Finnix is on a X.0 release, people tend to transpose it incorrectly a lot more often, saying "Finnix 0.92" etc. I think many people just cannot comprehend a version number greater than 10 or so.

Nothing huge, but his name is spelled Scot. I know this because there are relatively few "well known" Finnies in the world (at least with that spelling), and I happen to be one of them.

-- Ryan Finnie

(hey, it looks like I finally have more google juice than him.)

(subliminal message: download Finnix.)

I carry Finnix. It's a 100MB livecd with no X, but a command-line interface and a lot of tools for the sysadmin in mind. LVM autodetection, very quick boot (remember, no X), niche network utilities like vconfig/mii-diag/iptraf/etc. Memtest86+ via the boot menu of course. It even has a freedos boot profile for when you need to flash a BIOS.

Oh, and I'm kinda required to carry Finnix, since I'm the author. Oops :)

For previous FreeDOS releases, I used FreeDOS ODIN, which is a single disk with a lot of utilities, similar to those DR-DOS utility disks that come with everything these days. But for today's release, I decided to make my own 1.44MB utility disk, patterned after ODIN: http://www.finnix.org/Balder

(Shameless plug ahoy!)

Finnix, a small sysadmin livecd I produce, can be easily installed on a thumb drive. Boot the CD, and there's a script called finnix-thumbdrive that takes care of the necessary syslinux configurations to install on a thumb drive and make it bootable. Finnix includes a ton of utilities for sysadmins, and boots up pretty quickly.

The object of DSL wasn't to be so tiny you are amazed. The object was for it to fit on a business card CDR due to their small size and convenience. Well, business card CDRs are rare if at all made anymore. On the other hand, a mini-CDR still exists and is quite common (you can walk in Walmart and come out with some. Heck, I still have a bunch of mini-CDRW discs lying around for their handy nature.) These 8 cm radius discs can hold 210 MiB, possibly a bit more since, unlike with the DVD standard, back when they made the CD-R standard they actually didn't feel a need to try to cheat and trick the customer. If you think about it, since the smallest flash drive you can buy in a modern store is 128 MB (even if that may only be around 110 MiB or so,) you can't even find the old mini-CDRs that only held 185 MiB anymore, and finally business card discs are rare if at all existant anymore (and nearly no more convenient than a mini-CDR really) it just seems a little silly to be limited to 50 MiB for the sake of discs that if you actually had, you would not want to waste on that.

What's important is the philosophy. The idea of distros like these is to pack as many useful tools as possible into as little space as possible while maintaining minimalism. They remove a lot of the unnecessary stuff and get quite a surprising amount packed into it.

Personally, I carry a flash drive around which will boot on any system supporting USB-ZIP (read the readme.USBKEY file in the syslinux archive for how to do this and why you have to -- but, simply put, very few even modern BIOSes support USB-HDD even today.) Ok, it's a 512 MB model, but, I have to squeeze things in there because I have to store a lot of data, a copy of my browser for those systems that force you to use an old version of Firefox (IE is dead to me) and so on. I LOVE having a handy little live linux distro that can boot off of it and be used to repair/diagnose a lot of problems among other things. I can't afford to have some huge 1 GB large image of Ubuntu or something though on my little flash drive, so that's where a linux distro following this philosophy comes in. Honestly though, I am forced to admit I didn't really like DSL that much (remember, with linux distros it's all a matter of opinion and, as they say "to each to his own." I don't like it because it isn't good, I don't like it because it just isn't the type I want.) Personally I used Finnix (site's a little slow these past few days or so) which has much more up to date packages. It's one of the many live distros that follow the same sort of philosophy DSL follows. Squeeze handy stuff in there, remove unneeded clutter. It's my hope that we see even MORE distros like this in the future, not less.

I just thought I'd do some shameless advertising and mention my distro, Finnix. It's a 100MB livecd that has no X, desktops, productivity tools, etc... but makes up for it by having a ton of sysadmin utilities, such as LVM detection and cryptsetup. It's basically the CD you carry around to help fix broken systems. There's also a PPC port, obviously can be booted from a thumb drive, as well as within Xen/UML virtualization systems.

Finnix doesn't really compete with DSL, except for the "damn, this system is hosed, I don't have a recovery CD around, and I don't want to wait to download 700MB for something like Knoppix" crowd.

I've fooled around with Finnix , a bootable-CD distibution of Linux. It's pretty lightweight and worked well for me, but I'm not sure how well the networking support is. Anyway, it might be a nice place to start. -Don

Another run-from-cd linux I experimented with is finnix, but it is a little out of date and has no X.

One thing I noticed with finnix is that the RAM disks it creates are small. The demolinux page mentions a warning about the same thing. Has anyone used linux to create RAM disks bigger than 4 MB, and if so did they have to do anything special ?