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I used to hand roll my own tiny VMware VMs using Busybox and uclibc. It was very tedious and time consuming, but I was able to create VMs that were less than 1
by EmmEff 15y ago
I used to hand roll my own tiny VMware VMs using Busybox and uclibc. It was very tedious and time consuming, but I was able to create VMs that were less than 10MB when compressed and virtual disks of whatever desired size when uncompressed.
Gentoo Linux (if it's still around?) might be a good start since you can compile the entire world yourself and decide which features you do and do not want.
- exDM69 15y agoThere is a tool called buildroot that builds a kernel and a root file system with uClibc and Busybox. The result size for x86_64 using default settings is a few megabytes. You can trim this down a lot by leaving out features. Using uClibc instead of glibc may affect using virtual machines (like JVM), tho. Gentoo is still alive and kicking. It's not that difficult to use and the documentation might be the best docs I've seen in any distribution. It's also worth mentioning that with a modern CPU, the time it takes to build software is not that long. In fact, installing a "medium sized" application (e.g. not libreoffice) is faster with Gentoo's emerge than installing a standard Windows app. It takes about as long to download the source, compile and install with automation it as it does to navigate a web browser to a software's home page, locate download link and click "Next ->" 15 times in the installer manually.