Need small distro with http server and php

the_cranky_don · 10-28-2007, 06:17 AM

I am looking for the smallest distro possible that will run http server with php. php must be compiled with sockets enabled. It will also need to have ssh.

I want to run a small low power server at home 24/7 that I can access from the www. This server will contain a page that, when activated, will send a WOL packet to my home theatre pc so I can access the EPG on it and set up new recordings. (I don't want to run my home theatre PC 24/7 due to the amount of power it consumes.)

The hardware that I am using for my server is a Nagasaki MS-2100. It uses a Geode 300MHz CPU and has 128MB RAM. I will be booting from CF so the file system will be read only.

I was looking at dsl and puppy but seem to be a lot of mucking around to remove unwanted programs to get them down in size, compile php, remaster distro etc.

Does anyone have any suggestion as to a suitable distro for my requirements?

2damncommon · 10-28-2007, 12:36 PM

I would use Debian. Do the minimal install (which is text only) and add what I wanted.
If using Puppy or DSL I would not worry about removing anything, due to their small size, but have them start with no X and disable any services I didn't want at startup.

jay73 · 10-28-2007, 01:52 PM

I haven't looked into it yet but Ubuntu server edition can set up a LAMP for you. No X by default so it shouldn't require too much in terms of resources.

reverse · 10-28-2007, 03:01 PM

Apache sounds like quite the overkill for what he's trying to do. Actually so does PHP. I think the best way would be to write something simple and small, from scratch, in C.

Also, perhaps a -very- minimalist Slackware installation?

the_cranky_don · 10-29-2007, 02:48 AM

Firstly, thank-you all for your input.
Secondly I chose php because from all my searching, the only code that would generate a WOL packet from the server-side used php. Apache was chosen as I don't know if any other web server will implement php the way I want. (Again guidance here would be appreciated.)
I haven't done any 'c' programming so it is a little beyond the scope of my project.
I also did a 'LAMP' Ubuntu install but it is huge, slow on the hardware and still not read only.

Thanks again,
Don =)