Appendix D. 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 (seems no more valid) or minilinux

8. monkey

9. DLX 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

19. SmallLinux by Steven Gibson. 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

21. linux-lite by Paul Gortmaker for very small systems with less than 2MB RAM and 10MB harddisk space (1.x.x kernel)

22. See also the packages at MetaLab formerly known as SunSite 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.