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In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. Storage is ridiculously

In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. Storage is ridiculously cheap. A 64MB compact flash card doesn't cost significantly less than a 2GB card (32x the storage). I have a few old PCs sitting around, a Pentium 4D, a core duo or two. These are full-size PCs, old Dells and IBMs. It doesn't make much of a difference if they are running an 11MB distribution or a full Debian with GUI. What I'd really like is a small form factor PC with full x86 support so that I can run DOS, or other PC oses, like the BSDs or BEOS. Ideally it would be the size of a Raspberry PI and cost the same. I know such systems are available, but the cost is an issue. Emulation just isn't the same either.

jandrese 9y ago
One thing that drives me nuts is how these embedded systems always want to use goddamn BusyBox instead of full fat Bash and userland. There's just enough stuff removed from BusyBox to break scripts and generally make life annoying. And for what, to save 20MB of space on your 16GB device?
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Not every embedded device has the luxury of 16 GB of storage.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    They're getting increasingly rare now that storage costs are so low. Why hobble something with an 8MB flash chip when a 1GB flash chip costs almost the same? Maybe you can shave some fractional pennies on not having to wire up so many address lines, but even that's marginal.
    - saagarjha 9y ago
      > Why hobble something with an 8MB flash chip when a 1GB flash chip costs almost the same? Maybe you can shave some fractional pennies on not having to wire up so many address lines, but even that's marginal. If you're making a hundred million of them, the marginal gains add up. There's no point in adding stuff you don't need.
markbnj 9y ago
We use alpine as a base for production containers because it makes pulling the image a lot faster. A typical image might be 10-20MB vs. 60-100+MB if based on ubuntu.
smhenderson 9y ago
In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. In my mind the primary value is learning. The smaller the system the more likely I can understand how all the parts interact. Once a basic understanding is achieved you can start layering in more and still keep up. Once you get a bit past that it's easy to create recovery media and other interesting boot tools. I'm sure others can think of more but that's the first thing that I think of when I think of LFS, Tiny and to a lesser extent distros like Slackware that still tend to keep things relatively simple.
dbuder 9y ago
embedded stuff, a dollar or two is a big deal sometimes.
zxexz 9y ago
>In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. I think this is pretty much why. If you were to take your average hacker/maker, most of them would probably have a similar sentiment. However, most of them would also have a story about how they needed some tiny distro like TCL recently for some niche use case. I myself needed a tiny distro recently. I had 22 rackmount servers with no HDD all on the same network, and I needed them to all run the same static binary. I realized like most Intel servers, with default settings, they will try to boot over the network with PXE. Wanting to not spend a day messing around with provisioning these servers, I decided I would just put a linux image on a USB stick, stick it in my OpenWRT router, and host it over TFTP. Serving a large image from a USB stick every time each of 22 servers started up was an unnecessary use of bandwidth and would often fail (I didn't have the best router). I also didn't need anything except a network stack and the ability to run a 64 bit static binary, so I did some research and ended up using the x86_64 version of TCL. Worked great! I'm sure tons of others have weird niche use cases for such a distro. Of course, as my needs evolved, I ended up just using a minimal Arch linux image...

jandrese 9y ago

One thing that drives me nuts is how these embedded systems always want to use goddamn BusyBox instead of full fat Bash and userland. There's just enough stuff removed from BusyBox to break scripts and generally make life annoying. And for what, to save 20MB of space on your 16GB device?

saagarjha 9y ago
Not every embedded device has the luxury of 16 GB of storage.
- jandrese 9y ago
  They're getting increasingly rare now that storage costs are so low. Why hobble something with an 8MB flash chip when a 1GB flash chip costs almost the same? Maybe you can shave some fractional pennies on not having to wire up so many address lines, but even that's marginal.
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    > Why hobble something with an 8MB flash chip when a 1GB flash chip costs almost the same? Maybe you can shave some fractional pennies on not having to wire up so many address lines, but even that's marginal. If you're making a hundred million of them, the marginal gains add up. There's no point in adding stuff you don't need.

markbnj 9y ago

We use alpine as a base for production containers because it makes pulling the image a lot faster. A typical image might be 10-20MB vs. 60-100+MB if based on ubuntu.

smhenderson 9y ago

In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. In my mind the primary value is learning. The smaller the system the more likely I can understand how all the parts interact. Once a basic understanding is achieved you can start layering in more and still keep up. Once you get a bit past that it's easy to create recovery media and other interesting boot tools. I'm sure others can think of more but that's the first thing that I think of when I think of LFS, Tiny and to a lesser extent distros like Slackware that still tend to keep things relatively simple.

dbuder 9y ago

embedded stuff, a dollar or two is a big deal sometimes.

zxexz 9y ago

>In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. I think this is pretty much why. If you were to take your average hacker/maker, most of them would probably have a similar sentiment. However, most of them would also have a story about how they needed some tiny distro like TCL recently for some niche use case. I myself needed a tiny distro recently. I had 22 rackmount servers with no HDD all on the same network, and I needed them to all run the same static binary. I realized like most Intel servers, with default settings, they will try to boot over the network with PXE. Wanting to not spend a day messing around with provisioning these servers, I decided I would just put a linux image on a USB stick, stick it in my OpenWRT router, and host it over TFTP. Serving a large image from a USB stick every time each of 22 servers started up was an unnecessary use of bandwidth and would often fail (I didn't have the best router). I also didn't need anything except a network stack and the ability to run a 64 bit static binary, so I did some research and ended up using the x86_64 version of TCL. Worked great! I'm sure tons of others have weird niche use cases for such a distro. Of course, as my needs evolved, I ended up just using a minimal Arch linux image...