Best super-small distro for ARM?
 

I have a lot of experience with Gentoo but I need something super-small I can run entirely from within a ramdisk on the 256MB Beaglebone. Can anyone recommend a super-small distro with good ARM support? I'm trying Tiny Core now but ARM support is new and I have yet to make it work 100%.

Imoho
 

It would be difficult to get better than a home-rolled Debian based set. It depends upon your limits and criteria beyond what you have posted.

I fully expect Tiny-Core to become the best Live-Mini option in this space, but it may take some time. While waiting, there is significant ARM support in several distributions. Debian is the best that I use, but I only use a small subset of what is available.

Thanks, can you recommend any others with excellent ARM support that I should check out?

I would think doing a netinstall of Debian Arm would be a nice one.
Not sure how small these are
Fedora
Ubuntu
ArmedSlack
Arch

You would need to research them further, as I have never used any of them.

Build your own with Buildroot. Using uclibc will help you get a smaller size and you can include all the things you want for whatever you want to do.

How small can Debian ARM get? Can it get smaller than Gentoo?

Buildroot looks very interesting.

It looks like buildroot doesn't have some of the packages I need.

Buildroot is actually fairly easy to extend. Adding your own packages is pretty easy. It supports packages that use GNU autotools, cmake, and plain old makefiles.

When you guys refer to Debian ARM above, do you mean Emdebian?

This is the one I' was going by.

http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/

Has anyone tried Embedian? It seems like it might be even better suited to something like this.

http://www.emdebian.org/

From ARM site. http://www.arm.com/community/softwar...ment/linux.php

Might look at Arch.