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Old 11-04-2012, 09:03 PM   #1
linuxquestionsrocks
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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%.
 
Old 11-05-2012, 10:27 AM   #2
wpeckham
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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.
 
Old 11-05-2012, 01:51 PM   #3
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Thanks, can you recommend any others with excellent ARM support that I should check out?
 
Old 11-05-2012, 03:42 PM   #4
FredGSanford
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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.
 
Old 11-06-2012, 05:20 AM   #5
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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.
 
Old 11-06-2012, 03:11 PM   #6
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How small can Debian ARM get? Can it get smaller than Gentoo?

Buildroot looks very interesting.
Last edited by linuxquestionsrocks; 11-06-2012 at 03:13 PM.
 
Old 11-06-2012, 09:28 PM   #7
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It looks like buildroot doesn't have some of the packages I need.
 
Old 11-07-2012, 04:44 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by linuxquestionsrocks View Post
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.
 
Old 11-07-2012, 01:16 PM   #9
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When you guys refer to Debian ARM above, do you mean Emdebian?
Last edited by linuxquestionsrocks; 11-07-2012 at 01:21 PM.
 
Old 11-07-2012, 11:48 PM   #10
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This is the one I' was going by.

http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
 
Old 11-08-2012, 02:12 PM   #11
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Has anyone tried Embedian? It seems like it might be even better suited to something like this.

http://www.emdebian.org/
 
Old 11-08-2012, 09:44 PM   #12
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From ARM site. http://www.arm.com/community/softwar...ment/linux.php

Might look at Arch.
 
  


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