Slashdot Mirror
The Swiss Army Knife of Linux?
e8johan asks: "I recently found the BusyBox project that combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable.
It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox
generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. As I look through the list of products and projects using BusyBox I find that most installers use it (RH, Slackware, Mandrake, Gentoo, etc.) As the footprint of this is very small, I came to wonder, are there any other smaller versions of common linux software. I found TinyX and the small linux project but I lack a proper desktop. Does anyone has a small desktop solution (like KDE or Gnome) to recommend. What I'm looking for is a proper desktop solution with common configurations tools, standardized IPC and common look-and-feel, not just another window manager."
There is already a swiss-army chainsaw. It's called Perl. Why get a knife? Isn't bigger better?
This sig no verb.
Some user configuration is required, of course.
http://paud.sourceforge.net/
I was going to look at your homepage to see what type of background you came from, if you might mean only graphical stuff as a desktop environment. However, I was immediately confronted with a warning that "The contents of this page may not be copied without my written permission." As looking at your page in a web browser makes a copy of it, I hastily hit the back button and cleared my cache. Please don't sue me, and I'm posting AC just to be sure.
Does anyone has a small desktop solution (like KDE or Gnome) to recommend.
Heheheh. That's a good one.
include $sig;
1;
PPT :-)
SiCE
-- search the web
Why not just use Perl? Its the answer to everything! Even operating systems are written in it!
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
the story author really should have put in a url to busybox.. here it is.
Trying to fit a memory-intensive desktop system into a small space is going to be difficult because they're opposite goals. System 6 and prior MacOS did it, but only by using black-and-white graphics and not providing most of the tools you'd expect nowadays from a graphical desktop. I think even GEOS needed several disks worth of data to load its desktop. And if the goal is to allow novice users to operate small distros, they'd take one look at that desktop and go "ew! Linux sucks!" and switch back to Windows.
There are many efforts to putting Linux (and other UNIXes) in places with limited amounts of space.
handhelds.org is all about running Linux on ipaqs. Space is a concern, of course, so various things are done. The conversion to Busybox has recently been made, saving almost 2MB of space as I recall.
There's also uClibc. The smallest I've ever seen glibc is about 1.5-2MB. uClibc clocks in at about 200-700kB. That's small. This is used when you just don't have space available, such as on the TuxScreen with only 4MB of bootable flash and on many rescue disks and floppy based Linux systems.
Remember you don't want to cut corners all the time. On your desktop, it's probably best to run the full-blown GNU utilities. They have extra options that, while not commonly used, have obviously proven useful enough times to be included.
However, if you only have 16-64MB to work in, and you want to have lots of other stuff, busybox is a very viable option that I would reccomend if you have trouble fitting stuff in. Don't use it when you've got gigs of hard drive space to play with though.
Well, i don't knwo if this helps you, but I recently put together a desktop set up for some lower end pentiums. It consists of
1) IceWM
2) RoX
3) gnumeric
4) abiword
5) opera
6) gnucash
7) gaim
8) gimp
9) sylpheed
I also used redhat 8's backgrounds, although the actual software was mostly from mandrake 9.
Honestly, i'm not sure this is what your looking for anyways.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
UPX, the Ultimate Packer for Executables is great when you don't have alot of diskspace available. It uncompresses binaries on the fly VERY quickly, so fast in fact that after compressing large programs you'll find that they are up and running FASTER than if they are not packed, simply because it can uncompress faster than it takes to load unpacked code from disk. It apparently can do something like 10MB/s decompression on a P133. ..anybody remember PowerPacker and the ilk on the Amiga? Those programs were worth their weight in gold when working on a floppy based system.
-- I speak only for myself.
we'd /B CON PROGRAM.EXE
COPY
and wes liked it!!!
http://freshmeat.net/projects/natld/
has lots of stuff
... Are mutually exclusive.
If you want a small graphical system, just run a window manager. All of the extra (unneeded) crap that comes with a "desktop" is always going to be larger. Always. There's more there, therefore larger. So don't argue. :)
And would love to create a central list of "smaller alternatives to common software". (Also a central list of "freer alternatives to common software").
Anyone up for creating a Yahoo! Group to discuss? Or does anyone have a better solution like some free mailing-list server?
We could chat as a community, and build a list...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
This is exactly what Linux from scratch was for.