Need advice building MiniDistro
 

Hi there,

me and a friend of mine have programmed an application. Now we would like to use this app on a Linux machine. Since the app takes up a lot of power, we would like to make our Linux as lean as possible.

To be precise, all we need is a Linux Kernel providing file system and networking (only tcp/ip) along with a shell (ash).

Before I start dabbling with this, I thought I would ask for some advice. What would you recommend on doing?

Cheers

Werfer

Hi,

Most distro's are rather over-complete, but that you already noticed, otherwise you wouldn't have asked this specific question :)

You could use LFS and a few needed packages from BLFS and/or some none-LFS packages. You will end up with a machines that has the basics to run linux (LFS) and the dependencies needed for your own application. That's about as lean as it can get.

Pro's: Very lean. Besides having installed only those packages that are needed, everything is compiled for your specific hardware.

Con's: You need experience to set up/configure LFS.

If building your own is not your thing, you can always check distrowatch for a distro that fits your needs.

If security is an issue and you don't have the experience to set that up from scratch, you can take a look at DW: Slackware and DW: (free)BSD

Both are solid, stable and secure. They are not 'state of the art', they rely on packages that have proven themself (for example: Slackware uses kernel 2.4, not 2.6).

You did ask for a linux solution, that said: freeBSD is not linux, it's unix. Don't know if your application allows that.

Hope this clears things up a bit.

Just install the Debian base system - about 110MB.