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Review/Overview of Lightweight Linux Distros
pcause writes "Here is a review of various lightweight Linux distros. Not sure I agree with the conclusions, since I am a PuppyLinux user, but it is a nice overview of some current options." Reviewed are: Arch 2007.08-2, Damn Small Linux 4.2.5, Puppy 4.0, TinyMe Test7-KD, Xubuntu 8.04, and Zenwalk 5.0.
CPU: Pentium 3 â" 600 MHz, Memory: 256 MB. That's a reasonable computer and he should have been able to run regular Debian on it. Etch and Lenny boot quickly these days. If you plan to use the laptop for years and want maximum package flexibility, Debian is a good bet. If you are looking for something quick and dirty for web browsing, these other distributions can save you some install time and might run a little faster. If things seem a little slow especially for multitasking, more RAM might help.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
IMO, the best light weight distribution is Debian. A net installation leaves you with nothing but a console. You can apt-get anything you need, and only what you need. Why do you need a specific distribution for this? What does the Debian based Damn Small Linux offer me that plain Debian doesn't?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Arch is a great distro. Sure, you have to do a lot yourself, but that's the point. By making you look over your /etc files at install, you get a good sense about what your system is actually loading during boot.
Did anyone else loose confidence in the writer once he said he was a gentoo user who noticed a big difference in compiling every application...?
1: Complete Development Toolkit
Yes, thats right, I want a full compiler and development environment, first and foremost
2: FULL SOURCE ONBOARD
No, don't bother arguing with me
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I agree with his statement that DSL can be pretty ugly, but it's very lightweight. I studied abroad for a semester and didn't bring a computer with me, but found an ancient Pentium-1 era machine that was being thrown out. It had Windows 95 on it, which would have been utterly useless; with DSL, I was able to plug a USB wifi dongle in it and get it working with ndiswrapper. Plus, if I remember correctly, DSL is based on Debian, so you can easily install the stuff it doesn't have (movie player, etc) with apt-get.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
No, really, I'd like to see a comparison, because the basic FreeBSD install without Gnome or KDE is pretty small, and it's what I'm used to, so I'd like to see how he compared it to these supposedly small Linux distros, since I'm doing more Linux in my new job.
Xubuntu is quite ok as a small distribution, but I think you would reasonably want 256 MB for it. Firefox 3 certainly uses a lot less memory than firefox 2, and that is quite important for me. And of course you need Adblock, because there is just way too much resource consuming Javascript out there.
In general the start-up and shut-down process could be faster, though. I guess this is down to an the old laptop disk.
I just installed Xubuntu 8.04 on that setup this weekend and it works OK. Hardly lightening fast feeling after coming off a c2d with 2 Gigs of RAM, but definitely usable. It's going into the guest room for, well, guests to use if they didn't bring a laptop of their own. Usually guests only need a browser, so it's perfect. If they need to print something, I've got networked printers.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I use this NetBSD distribution. The download is about 63 MBytes, and runs incredibly smoothly off of an old 128 MB flash drive that I have laying around. It comes with X and the Ion3 window manager. Of course since it's NetBSD, it runs on damn near anything. Even more impressive, it detects all of the hardware on my Thinkpad T41, even my wireless. Need a new package? Grab the tarball from the pkgsrc repository, drop it onto the usb stick, and it'll be loaded at next boot.
It's not easy to use for your typical windows user, but since there is no fluff, it comes naturally to any unix user. As another plus, it comes with links and ssh. Just enough for me to be productive, but not enough for me to get caught up in YouTube as I do so often at work.
anyone?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I think that DSL has a great niche working with really old hardware. The only distro I know of that is still actively being developed that is smaller than DSL is SliTaZ - very interesting, but very new.
DSL has an old 2.4 kernel, an old Firefox browser, but you can count on it to work with old stuff.
Puppy works with pretty old stuff, but really shines when you load it into RAM on equipment made within the past three years. Wireless support is something that Puppy handles better than DSL.
Zenwalk has a relatively unknown, but fast package manager called Netpkg and a snappy implementation of the XFCE desktop. Derived from an earlier implementation of Minislack, Zenwalk comes out of a stable Slackware heritage. With a fast package manager and a fast desktop implementation, Zenwalk carves a nice niche out of the Slackware landscape.
Arch Linux really is another distribution that once grew out of the Slackware space and has now come into its own with the pacman and AUR package management tools and the idea of giving you total and complete flexibility to build exactly and only what you want. It aims for simplicity rather than coddling the user with its own notion of ease of use. People really either love Arch Linux or avoid it for these very reasons.
Xubuntu is an easy to use system with very current software from the Hardy Heron Ubuntu project, replacing GNOME with XFCE on the desktop. Good solid stable software with excellent wireless network configuration.
TinyME is brand new, as far as a Version 1.0 implementation, but the project has been going on for a couple of years now as a community supported effort to provide lighter versions of the well regarded PCLinuxOS software. This one uses OpenBox instead of KDE. Like other PCLinuxOS systems, it really benefits from the good hardware detection algorithms from Mandriva and the solid packaging from "TexStar", expert RPM packager and founder of PCLinuxOS.
As you can see, each of the distributions mentions has a nice niche. They won't all be appealing to everyone, but each of them is solid in several respects - certainly a credit to the modularity of both Linux and GNU software.
Brian Masinick, masinick at yahoo dot com Linux
A pity that the author didn't review these two. Not only they are they compact and snappy, but they also include the full-featured KDE desktop environment. I couldn't believe how fast they are when I tried them as LiveCDs - and they can be installed on HD, too!
Everybody has their own flavor for support but does anyone do this anymore besides LFS and the hardcore hackers?
Sorry, but Ubuntu or any of its derivatives do NOT qualify as "lightweight". I find it amusing that Arch was rated towards the end of the list, most likely because they couldn't figure out how to install it.
I am an Archlinux user right now... but if you listed all these on the IQ test from yesterday, and asked me what doesn't belong in the group, I would right Archlinux. They compared X booting live-cd distributions to Archlinux. Maybe he should try FaunOS?
I'll comment your response, since argent didn't include links.
FreeBSD have a lot of virtues, but you still haven't shown me anything that is even comparable to the small Linux distributions reviewed in this article. I see a lot of tools to make those Live CDs, but no effort to actually build a usable live CD for ordinary people. I might be wrong, please do prove me wrong.
<prejudice+experience> This is the saddest part of *BSD, there's so many cool things, but so little will to make it accessibly. *BSD is all about hand building everything, patching your SCSI drivers to get them working etc.</prejudice+experience> The Live CDs mentioned in the article are supposed to just work.
Everything can be made small, the first time I did a install of Linux on a machine I owned I had 80MB to play with, that worked very fine, I could even compile everything. If I wanted to compile the Linux kernel I had to do remove x11 and reinstall it afterwards, so it was tight. What I want to say is that everything is possible it's just a question about how much work you want to do, and reinstalling X everytime you want to recompile your kernel isn't that nice.
<-- batman provided links, So I'll comment there.
;-) Debian boots easily with 30MB memory, and with LVM and module loading disabled it needs 13MB.
All that is true for most Linux distributions as well, but many servers can very well have use for X11 even though they are headless. Maybe you want to play XBattle with your friends.
Just thought I would give some refs, not sure why..
Sadly if you are running make on a 500KB/s hardrive and a 10 Mbps ethernet card you are going to be limited by that.
You can find its wiki page here (With the download links):
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/XfceLive
Here is a review:
http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2008/05/05/06/45/29-mandriva-linux-one-2008-spring-x
It's a community version but its package selection is in the official Mandriva tool to build LiveCD ( http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Draklive ) .
DSL has working X, a browser, and some other utilitarian-type apps. There's still a demand for a "ready-to-run", "load it and go" CD-based distro. I have to ask, "Why start with a bunch of junky software that's there just because it's small?"
/bare/ minumum, and apt-get the far-end of what you need, e.g. epiphany.. Apt-get will bring down Xorg, the req'd gtk libs, etc. Hardly more than you really need, and if so, there's always deborphan. The one thing that kept me from posting a fanboy-esque "Netinstall FTW" comment was the 158MB total download. The Business Card install, OTOH, is somewhere around 50!
I'm totally with you on the Netinstall Debian angle. Start small, and 'apt-get' what you need. I built a demo server today in under an hour using that concept. I don't know what the installed footprint is, but I'm betting it's under 500MB. The beauty of this approach lies in apt-get's dependency resolution. You begin with the
You can easily install 'live-helper' and roll your own using the same approach if it's a live-cd that you're after..
Same here, I also run Xubuntu on a quite nice Laptop with 2 GB. Why? Because at the time when I started out with Ubuntu it felt a little sluggish from time to time and Xubuntu didn't. I also realised that I don't care about Nautilus and those other fancy desktop thingies Gnome offers and XFCE pretty much does what I need without getting in my way. Most of my work is either in the mail client, the web browser (like now) or in a ssh session to a VM anyway.
For some time I considered looking for a distro better fitting my profile, but as I'm quite happy with the selection of packages and updates offered by Ubuntu, switching doesn't seem to promise too much benefit for the effort.
Somehow XUbuntu feels like a natural Upgrade from Windows 95. Unspectacular, but it doesn't get in your way and my grandmother doesn't get confused by it.
For my play-around-with machine, I run a desktop I built myself with scavenged parts. I'd consider it approximately equal to an average Windows 2000 machine, or a low, low, low end XP machine. I, too, am (or was) a gentoo user.
Do you KNOW how long emerge kde takes for my machine?
3 days. 72 hours. For the love of God, why is that OK?
Do you realize that there are half a dozen people here who don't see sarcasm? You can almost hear them running to linux from scratch to see how small an OS they can make for you. This is inevitably followed by several dozen other people leaving them comments on the LFS forums about how they would have done it differently. Ahh, /. Where every minor detail becomes a war for geek cred.
I came through this problem when I bought ThinkPad 560X. With 32 mb and no internet connection, I was so badly stuck, since half of these live cds won't even boot. I should add that with so many multitude of problems, I wanted to see which distro lets me get through with least of problems. Here is what I found:
Damn Small Linux: really small, but I was unable to get gcc working. Comes with many bells and whistles.
DSL-N : Same problems. Runs like molasses on a slow computer.
Debian woody : I installed it, but without internet connection, the installation sucks.
Debian sarge : Couldn't boot it. Suffers from same problem.
Ubuntu/Mandriva : Memory too low.
Gentoo : No thanks.
Slackware 11.0 : Downloaded the dvd - comes with precompiled packages and source-code. Works flawlessly. I installed from a floppy. You can install basic packages + whole development packages + a lot of bells and whistles within 400 mb.
Slackware 12.1 : No floppy installation, otherwise almost same as 11.0.
My advice? Get Slackware 11.0 if you are stuck with Floppy - otherwise get Slackware 12.0 - and nothing requires internet connection.
I see a lot of tools to make those Live CDs, but no effort to actually build a usable live CD for ordinary people.
/usr/src until "make world" worked, and that became Patchkit 23 for 386BSD. :)
The Fine Article isn't about LiveCD installs, so that's a bit of a red herring. CD drives have so much latency that about the only way I've found a LiveCD really usable as a desktop is if I'm running it in a VM from an ISO image on disk... and while some of these CDs are "liveCDs", they're not being used that way in the article.
So setting that aside, if you want a big old KDE desktop running FreeBSD, look at DesktopBSD.
If you want a small distro, then FreeBSD itself is a small distro. It's not ad friendly as Kubuntu, but if you read the article then neither are many of the tiny Linux distros reviewed... in fact some of them seem a good deal less friendly than FreeBSD which comes with a solid text-mode package manager by default.
That was my point. Going by the article itself, some of these distros seemed to be no-nonsense setups that put you in a decent small environment. That hasn't been my experience with popular Linux distros... they either are trying to be Windows, or they're trying to be Slackware 0.1.
PS: 80MB? Luxury! When I installed my first BSD system of my own, my home server was a PC running System V, I had two 10 or 20 MB hard disks and I sacrificed one to the cause and put 386BSD on it. I couldn't build the whole system, so I went through and patched
Sounds like you emerged the wrong package - kde-meta or whatever it's called, which contains everything under the sun. If you're going to pull in applications you don't want then Gentoo is not at all the right distro to do it in.
kde-base/kdebase-startkde is a minimalist package that only pulls in the core libraries and their dependencies. It basically takes your X server and just does enough to replace the ugly grey x-checkered pattern with a default background, without installing additional common components like kicker, konqueror, or konsole.
I installed this on an AMD Athlon XP / Sempron, 1.2 GHz, 512 MB; it does not take much longer than most other packages.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
The thing is, you can just about beg for a (free) faster system (hardware). Even though I hate software bloat, there's no substitute for a faster hard drive, more memory etc. Running Puppy for speed on a new(ish) system; not slow hardware, is interesting. Yet, it all comes back to what you want. All these package management choices, while freedom, do not measure up (for me) to the deb based ubuntu system and packages. I prefer Kubuntu but Gnome is fine too. I've done the Xubuntu thing and I have zero use for it compared to Kubuntu. You know, you can just use Konqueror as your browser to save memory. Konq shares with KDE, so it's more efficient. Currently, I'm optimizing Kubuntu. You see, what about dynamic progression? By the time I got DSL, Puppy, Absolute, AntiX (a good one) set up; the way I liked it, it was time to move on. None of these system are as easily upgradeable as *ubuntu. I think the best success I had slummin' on old boxes (A bad habit of mine indeed) was to install the *ubuntu base and add icewm and many other little things, in order to keep the speed up (avoid disk thrashing at all costs.) I have done GUI internet browsing with 24MB RAM! Now that's hard!!! Trust me, you'll probably like icewm and the SilverXP theme for your best light weight, GUI, window manager. If you go through it's easy text settings, you can make it look anyway you wish. You might find a pre-done settings file and pop that in First. In the end, you can have some speed on really old boxes but you will want more memory (if possible) and it will never win many converts compared to Kubuntu and at least 384MB RAM.
I also like the greater hardware compatibility with an *ubuntu base. Use the alternate CD. *ubuntu base plus icewm is the lowest and best solution for 32MB to 256MB RAM. Sorry Fluxbox lovers. Yes, Flux is good too, it's just more "different" to me. I know it's because I'm used to seeing things a certain way and I don't care. I think most new users will like icewm ONCE thy realize, they can edit the simple text file to move stuff around on the task bar (etc..) Yes, you will have to tweak it a little more than a live solution such as Puppy but you get a better system fit (for you and your hardware,) better upgrade ability and better compatibility. Yes, you can use a Debian base but the bottom line is, it's more work. So the real question is, how much geek work (time) do you want to spend on a box that while it can be made to get the job done (depending on the job you want done,) it will not be subjectively "better" than a newer system with Kubuntu. Step one, really improve the hardware, as much as possible. More RAM. Faster HD. Better (auto magic time saving) devices that are KNOWN to work. For example, I have two old USB Wifi units with decent antennas (on the end of the USB cable runs) that JUST WORK, only on *ubuntu and with Zero setup time! NDISwrapper is great and all, but it takes up time.
Well, with 256MB I'd probably go ahead and do a custom tweaked Kubuntu. But before I'd do Xubuntu, I'd drop down to the *ubuntu base + icewm. For the pure speed of it. It can rival the speed of newly purchased systems! This is subjective but I'd further specify: less than 32MB I'd not bother (my choice). 32MB to 128MB icewm (on *ubuntu base) 128MB to 192MB icewm or maybe play with a Puppy live CD (but which one?) It would load into RAM! 256MB (maybe 192MB if shared video didn't eat it up) and up I'd make Kubuntu lean; if below the Kubuntu recommended min of 384MB. turn of unused services, etc. Of course, higher memory can play with a Puppy CD also. But my main production system would definitely be Kubuntu if RAM alowed. Notes: You can run more than one window or desktop manager but your upgrades may go more slowly. You can follow online guides to go back to pure Kubuntu(or others) and speed up those upgrades. Everyone (and their computer) is different so you get to decide what fits you best. I've had a fair an actual experience on many differing old laptops and desktops. I just want to save you some time. While you can make just about anything work, working fast is more challenging. All this and I didn't even get into dominate CLI use, There are non-gui uses for old boxes you MIGHT want to explore but I'm talking GUI here.
Debian running on a salvaged Dell Lattitude XPi
Pentium1 133Mhz and 24MiB.
Installation done using floppies (didn't manage to use the dock's SCSI) and a 10mpbs connection.
It works although it's a bit slow.
Graphic interface (using fluxbox as desktop environment) is a little bit sluggish (better not start firefox. Dillo can do the job instead).
You were trying to be funny, but some are actually doing it for real.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
For hardware, if the machine's got an Ethernet card and you're satisfied with the graphics resolution, and have enough disk space, you're fine. You won't be adding wireless cards that didn't have drivers back in the day, and lack of USB can be annoying (and my old P133 laptop has pre-Cardbus PCMCIA slots, so those are pretty much ruled out as well), and if you don't have enough RAM it's probably cheaper to buy a new motherboard than a lot of older-format RAM. But the machine was blazingly fast back when you bought it... even if it can't play MPEGs today.
Bloated software's a somewhat different issue - I won't say that Netscape 2.0 was a great system, but it could do basic web browsing back then and still can. You'll have trouble with Flash-heavy web pages, and maybe some Javascript, and you won't be able to open 50 tabs in the background of your browser unless you find an older version of Opera which will have no trouble (remember when Opera fit on half a floppy disk?) And CSS probably won't work, so web sites won't come out with the exact same font size that the web designer wanted, but they were never supposed to.
Does all of this mean that when my PII-233 had a big purple flash from the motherboard a few years ago and let the blue smoke escape, I went looking for another PII to replace it? No
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What if I only want to run Apache (well, let's future-proof that statement and say a full LAMP stack)? Keeping in mind the need to patch regularly to avoid security problems (and thus having access to a yum or apt equivalent; not source code), what's a lightweight distro you folks would recommend? I would want to run this in a VM, but I don't think that imposes any additional requirements.
It's been a while since I moved away from gentoo, I'm sad to see I did so through my own ignorance. Thanks, I'll be moving back for 2008.0.
Assuming it's not out yet. Haven't been up on my distrowatch.com readings lately.
Meh. They're releasing 2008.0 soon. Gentoo has been in decline for a while, but they got a great kick in the pants when they were shamed in January with the public news of their disencharterment with the state of New Mexico (which has recently been rectified). They've been improving for a while, but I write this just to warn you that it may not be exactly like you remember it.
I'm still sticking with it for my new box. Gotta love that startkde package.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Go with Ubuntu "server-install" - better updates to future-protect yourself. Hardcore-types might fiddle with Debian, FreeBSD, Gentoo, etc. But there is a growing userbase of the X/K/Ubuntu's that provide many hints and fixes and forums to get and keep you going.
Look for 'perfect server' setups on google. here's an older version of Ubuntu LAMP setup http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Edgy/Servers
One of the problems with many of the light distros is you load up a program and there isn't a quick nor obvious way to add the program to the "start menu"... Some do automatically, but most of the lighter ones you have to go searching... /bin..nope.. /sbin...nope...nope...not there... etc.
I did a Xubuntu install recently and then loaded up many of the lighter weight window managers via apt-get to try them out ( I was going to do another install so I wasn't worried about borking the system). Enlightenment, fluxbox, flwm, icewm, jwm, openbox, and saphire. Plan was to do a server install and an alternate WM.
A couple of them I liked, but I ended up back at Xfce on standard Xubuntu because it still had the best (of the lighter WMs) program finding menu without a bunch of internet searches to find the "tricks". Though Xfce is not as good for menus as KDE (so when recommending someone upgrade their old PC to try out Linux I have them start with Kubuntu).