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Outlining Thin Linux

Posted by Soulskill on from the tux-on-a-diet dept.

snydeq writes: Deep End's Paul Venezia follows up his call for splitting Linux distros in two by arguing that the new shape of the Linux server is thin, light, and fine-tuned to a single purpose. "Those of us who build and maintain large-scale Linux infrastructures would be happy to see a highly specific, highly stable mainstream distro that had no desktop package or dependency support whatsoever, so was not beholden to architectural changes made due to desktop package requirements. When you're rolling out a few hundred Linux VMs locally, in the cloud, or both, you won't manually log into them, much less need any type of graphical support. Frankly, you could lose the framebuffer too; it wouldn't matter unless you were running certain tests," Venezia writes. "It's only a matter of time before a Linux distribution that caters solely to these considerations becomes mainstream and is offered alongside more traditional distributions."

10 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. min install by bugs2squash · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm sure I've installed minimal gentoo and Debian systems that fit that description.

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    Nullius in verba
    1. Re:min install by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ubuntu already divides the server from the Desktop. It is split in two, and he didn't need to open his mouth, just do a Google search and he would have found it.

      Of course, the distro doesn't have the exact minimal install he needs, but no distro will because everyone has a different set of needed packages. Unless he builds it himself. If only there were a way to do that......I'm pretty sure Gentoo "emerge nginx" will do exactly what he's asking, too.

      Also, who on earth is Paul Venezia? He calls himself someone "who builds and maintain large-scale Linux infrastructures." Can that possibly be true?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:min install by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Also, who on earth is Paul Venezia? He calls himself someone "who builds and maintain large-scale Linux infrastructures." Can that possibly be true?

      He's a master at clickbait articles. It's an Info World article. Were you really expecting quality journalism?

    3. Re:min install by micheas · · Score: 3, Informative

      Tom's root boot linux was two 3.25" floppies. I didn't know there was a smaller distro.

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      Work bio at MMWD
    4. Re:min install by dbIII · · Score: 3, Informative

      He had it on one floppy for a while, but eventually due to a lot of kernel modules (that means drivers for MS centric folks) it grew to a boot floppy and a separate root floppy.
      I used it as a general purpose toolkit for stuffed MS and linux machines for a few years, before using DamnSmallLinux, knoppix and now clonezilla for that role.

  2. Sounds like Slackware to me. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm sure I'm also wrong somehow. I haven't touched Slack in 10 years. What am I missing?

  3. Linux From Scratch by blackt0wer · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.linuxfromscratch.or... Everything you need, nothing you want.

  4. Yes, just like that. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    We used to run linux in the server room because it was lean and easy to admin. Windows was slow, mousy, and dependencies were hellish.

    Now we run Windows Server 2012 with no GUI, virtualized, and admin with powershell. We've ripped out tens of thousands of dollars of Red Hat; windows is cheaper.

    Basically there aren't any linux server distros that are like Red Hat used to be before the Fedora fiasco. It seems like Red Hat today is doing a bad job of trying to be a GUI laptop distro running on server hardware. And they are letting mature stuff like PADL's LDAP modules go to seed while shipping raw, buggy stuff like SSSD, instead of maintaining the old stuff until the new is reliable enough for real world use.

  5. Re:What about BSD derivatives by devphaeton · · Score: 5, Informative

    When it comes to the Big Three (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) the complete system is precisely what this Venezia guy is describing. It is a working system with everything you'd need to run a legitimate server. Things like X, dev tools (excluding C compilers) etc are considered "3rd party add-ons". IME BSD systems are logical, intuitive, robust, light and fast. The other nice benefit is that everything is developed by the same team, and the documentation is superb.

    Don't get me wrong, I love linux too. But the BSDs are sorely under-appreciated for what they are and can do.

    That said, the base install of most of the original Linux distributions (or the base install plus a handful of packages) is also what sysadmins have been using for decades as a "server-oriented linux system".

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    do() || do_not(); // try();
  6. BSD by ThePhilips · · Score: 3, Informative

    What this guy is looking for is called BSD. In the past, base system was bit less than 30MB. Useless, but still less than base setup of most modern distros.

    Among Linuxes, probably only Slackware stayed relatively close to the roots and still can be stripped to the bone. And Debian isn't that far off, really, if you are willing to go on rampage with the rm command (remove man pages, documentation, supplemental files, localizations, etc).

    Othereise, this guy has probably missed completely that people are already for years building their own "lean and slim" special-purpose distros using the Gentoo as a factory distro. Because what he asks is really "special-purpose". In most real-world cases, the disk space is cheap and the users want to be able to install new software with just few clicks.

    --
    All hope abandon ye who enter here.