Hello friends,
I am using Slackware for very long time now. I would like to install a Slackware on a 512 mb usb drive. I need all the command line tools, but not a GUI. If someone can suggest me will slackware accomodate on such a small space with a swap partition, or which other slackware based distros will help. I will be much grateful.

With warm regards,
Vivek.

Take a look at Slax?

Believe it or not, I have Slackware-current installed on 350mb of space on a crappy old 120mhz laptop someone gave me.
And a 100mb of swap.

I have most of A packages, some stuff from AP, apache, mysql and php, and the minimal N packages to get me Interneted. And the minimum of Emacs. php/mysql stuff is a litte sluggish but other than that everything runs quite well.

du -h output
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 354M 296M 39M 89% /

Or, Zipslack.

I believe there are quite a few mini-linuxes out there that may fit on that small of a slice...some of those are slackware-based. Google should help you.

Zipslack on a Zipdrive is how I got it on the laptop (no CD).

I also have a small Slackware machine (256M). It's easy to make a great service machine for maintenance and managements tasks with the way the Slackware installation is scripted. If you use the right mode you can select each and every package you want.

512M is enough for a nice desktop machine

Like oneandoneis2 said, Slax is also a great choice. It has distros from around 50M and up and is very, very nice.

If you have 256Mb of RAM I think that swap partition is useless, unless you make something heavy on memory, like mySQL. I have 256Mb + GUI (iceWM) and only 20Mbytes of swap is used BUT 70Mbytes are cached. So in reality, I have 50 Mbytes free. Try with small swap, I have 100Mbytes I wish I made it smaller!

ZipSlack is superb, well, it is slackware!

If all you want is CLI, use ZipSlack, or at least follow the packages list for it to create you own. Or, now you use the package list from the rescue image on CD2 which is zipslack minus the sound packages.

I have built a special distro for running from USB with a nice GTK-1.2 GUI and around 20 desktop apps -all in 240MB and without leaving out any documents or programs that leave it non-POSIX.

Actually, RUNT Linux is what you are asking for. It's untainted Zipslack plus extra networking tools. Trouble is that to use it from USB you'll always have to boot with an initrd -either boot-floppy or CD or syslinux on the drive. And it uses umsdos, so it may be slower and less robust. And, it'll trash your drive after awhile. But you'll feel right at home.

Hello friends,
Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I am very much looking forwared to install zipslack on my small drive. And I am also going to try slackware without the X. I hope I succeed. I will get back to your and tell you what happened.

With warm regards,
Vivek.

I run zipslack. Zipslack stock install is really 120 meg once you put it on an ext2 file system instead of fat32.

You get a ton of stuff in ziplsack that I personally deleted. I got zipslack down to 65 meg on ext2. I added in X11, x11-misc fonts and x11 100dpi fonts. I then added blackbox becaue I wanted gui. I'm still under 200 meg.

firefox put me just over 205 meg.

Ive just done a basic install of slack on a machine that will be my fileserver, however ive decided to build from the ground up, so installed most of a and a few from ap.

Just over 150 meg with the 2.6 kernel in testing

very nice! put it in ram put it in ram if you can! that badboy will fly.

Hi friends, I put zipslack on a VMware win98 machine. It runs fast, and that too on a VMware. But it dosen't give any gcc or libraries, not even the make util. My purpose is to get things started on a USB pen drive. And to make that pen drive as a plug and play server that can be highly portable with various kernels in it. I also tried RUNT linux. But it wouldn't boot. I tried to tweak bios but failed. The bios does support USB booting. I also tried Slackware 10 with a and ap sections and with networking. But it went over 600 MB and again it wouldn't boot. I am now trying some different settings on my bios and I will be back and tell you what happened.
Your mails have been a great help to me. Thanks a lot everyone.
With warm regards,
Vivek J. Joshi.

zip slack has a lot of stuff in it too that can be removed to be honest. i got it down to 60 meg on one machine. but your right, thinks like make,gcc are not in there. you just get your handy cd you got the first one, and install those packs from "l"