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MiniOS – a lightweight Linux distribution designed for USB drive
- airbreather 3y agoThere is a spelling typo on the front page: "The system-constructor, in its basic version, is an analogue of the >>>>Stantard<<<< version"
- giantg2 3y agoReminds me of DSL - Damn Small Linux. Only those were the days of running on a floppy.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoOr Puppy Linux! The first day I popped that CD drive in and was able to run the internet browser ten times faster than I ever could on my decrepit family computer was a magical moment for me. It made me realize just how much power was being wasted on things I neither knew nor cared about under the surface.
- autumn-antlers 3y agoI liked this post about Puppy Linux so much it's linked on my home page (nvm that i dont have any other pages): https://artemis.sh/2022/07/15/decision-making-is-finite.html https://artemis.sh/2022/07/15/decision-making-is-finite.html Might have less to do with the post and more to do with my own fond memories of Puppy and it's community
- anthk 3y agoToday I used the opposite approach. I began with Debian, next SuSE8, Knoppix, Aurox, Debian Sarge for lots of years, and, after OpenBSD, I use Hyperbola with a pretty sparse cwm with uxterm, links+, and for music/podcasts I use two scripts: sfeed_download, anonradio, tpradio and amused playing my collections at random. No bling bling, almost no features with sfeed.
- helpfulContrib 3y agoIn my very early days with Linux, my side-distraction 386 had been running a hand-cobbled kernel, cross-compiled, no network access, and then with some rootfs and bin tools built by following some obscure thing I read on minix-list. And it was fine for me to log in and poke at it, for a while - after all, I only used it as a side hack thing while I waited for my work-related MIPS pizzabox and other things to do their other thing, for which I was paid, at the time. But then came Yggdrasil. I 'temporarily' yanked the CD drive out of my bosses 486 editing/gaming machine, popped the floppy into da' box, flipped the switch, and up she booted in glorious VGA 640x400. A kind-of working X workstation, which .. everyone in the dev team .. found it kind of an astonishing feat for this much belittled 386 toy. "Okay then, we've got an extra term .. do the network drivers work?", as we chortled at the frequency flop. And so it began. Oh, what a world that little kernel has wrought, and I am eternally grateful for the fact of its existence, my ability to use it and push it out into the wide, wide world personally, and so on. The USB boots are great. Totally down for Terabyte+FAST USB sticks, though, sooner or later .. I mean, "my bootable USB stick is a compute stick, kthx.." What a ride.
- gattilorenz 3y agomuLinux (live distro based on a modular set of floppy disks, including X11 and gcc... and somewhat questionable English grammar) and the Knoppix CD and later DVD were pretty cool too. Oh, and tomsrtbt, "the most GNU/Linux on a floppy disk"!
- anthk 3y agoThen there was Nehabodi, Nethack 3.4.3 in a floppy disk.
- downrightmike 3y agoThat's a name I haven't heard of in a long while http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ 50MB ISO, last release was in 2008, a year before the first version of MiniOS came out.
- kiney 3y agoI remember burning that 50MB iso on a credit card sized CD an carrying it in my wallet all the time back then...
- thisismyhna 3y agoDSL was one of my first Linux distros. Loved the small credit card size cd it had.
- vmfunction 3y agowith usb at about 256gb - 1tb now. Looking forward to a world were everyone carries their computer in a usb.
- Arnavion 3y agoWrite throughput and flash lifetime are still a concern for that.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoLaptops typically have 8 GB or more RAM which is a lot more than you need of r a lightweight OS; perhaps the rest could be used as a cache that is periodically flushed to the USB. For most uses of such a device there isn't much writing going on anyway.
- lomereiter 3y agoYou could buy a USB enclosure for an M.2 NVMe SSD - a bit bulkier but still portable and addresses your concerns.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- doubled112 3y agoI was using portable apps off of a USB stick what must have been 15 years ago. I thought this was the future back then, but now we all just carry entire computing devices with more storage than that and call them phones. https://portableapps.com/ https://portableapps.com/ I can't believe it's still in development.
- mxuribe 3y agoFor me, my portable Apps phase was about 10 or so years ago...and it felt so awesome! I also thought it would be the model for the future! :-)
- giancarlostoro 3y agoThis is one of those sites that hijacks your scrolling, which I wish there was a standard for "please just let me scroll freely". It's not super awful but its kind of annoying, I like to read things on either the top or bottom edge of my browser window so I dont lose my spot.
- dekken_ 3y agoit's super obnoxious, even when it's only slight sensitivity changes (which it isn't here) I notice it and feel violated
- Pfiffer 3y agoReal question: Why is this even allowed at a browser level?
- MenhirMike 3y agoBecause some people think that Browsers should be the ultimate app platform, so hijacking your inputs or preventing proper zoom makes sense to them even though it's utterly user hostile.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoWhich has led us to regress in terms of building GUI desktop apps. Remember the 2000s and 90s how you could make a somewhat native UI in Visual Basic 6 and Delphi, now you got to use an entire browser to get there.
- duped 3y agoI remember UIs causing BSODs, horrible crashes, and corrupting files too.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- hk1337 3y agoI remember running Linux on a floppy disk back in the 90s. Used it as a NAT between the school network and my computer(s) in my room. Pretty cool to see the functionality increase with portability. Although, floppy disk space is significantly less than a USB drive.
- gpribeiro 3y agoCoyote Linux, maybe? I used it at home in the beginning of the 2000s.
- rzzzt 3y agoThere's a famous single floppy router distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project LGR has a video on a PC-based appliance (a wireless access point) where the "firmware" source was a walled-off 3.5" drive with a floppy inside. That one ran DR-DOS however: https://youtu.be/DOkapxbW93g https://youtu.be/DOkapxbW93g
- hk1337 3y agoI believe that was it but Coyote Linux sounds familiar too. I think it perhaps used that distribution.
- suprjami 3y agoI used Freesco ("Free Cisco") to do the same. It's hilarious these days to think about a power-hungry 486 running full time to do such a trivial task.
- clnq 3y agoI’m probably going to make some Linux desktop guys mad, but the page says “Attention to detail” and then proceeds to show very many desktop window screenshots where the styles are very inconsistent. Font sizes, margins around elements, menu bar styles, title bar styles and naming conventions, one of the windows has an application icon in the title, but only one, the icon sizes are very different. What’s the point of saying “attention to detail” and then showing this?
- amelius 3y agoApparently, those are not the important details.
- liotier 3y agoIndeed - different classes of users will have different perceptions. I never understood why anyone would feel ruffled by different applications using different UI libraries...
- somethingAlex 3y agoIt just seems odd in this context given they are willfully compiling these screenshots together, displaying them prominently, and saying they pay attention to details. What details are they trying to highlight here, if not the UI details? In general the UI doesn't even look good. It's just a bunch of unflattering grey.
- O1111OOO 3y agoI love this. I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a year or two (Netbook, load to RAM, save changes to USB). It was the most comfortable I ever felt using a computer. I used my laptop's HD as a pure data drive for large files only. Puppy encrypted the entire OS on USB. So it would boot fine but needed to be decrypted during the boot process. It contained all my apps, system settings and smaller files (docs, html, passwords, personal docs, etc) that I decided to save in the encrypted OS/USB. The laptop's mounted HD contained the larger stuff... tons of videos, pics, etc.. basically all the stuff I didn't really need to protect/encrypt. Someone could steal the laptop and I wouldn't care (all that large stuff is always backed up too on externals). Someone could steal the USB and they'd have to know it was a bootable, encrypted USB. Even so, they'd also need to know how to decrypt on boot. I felt so safe even when traveling. I could also plug my USB into any laptop and BOOM! ready to go:-) It was like a plug-n-play super-power. I saw MiniOS listed here and I immediately thought of my old Puppy setup. Looking forward to giving this OS a spin. I hope it considers my use case in their thinking (though I'm sure I can tweak it easily to fulfill my needs).
- kwhitefoot 3y ago> I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a year or two If it was so good why did you stop? I used Puppy too a while ago but found that once I wanted to run something that the Puppy guys hadn't packaged that it was a bit more work to install things. That's probably not the case now that there is a Debian based Pup, perhaps I should consider trying again.
- O1111OOO 3y ago> If it was so good why did you stop? This was maybe 14 years ago. I sold the netbook and started using Windows full time again. I was still in this middle state between using Linux and Windows - going back and forth between the two. When I decided the leave Windows completely (Windows 10 spyware release summer/2015), I settled on a full-featured distro. I did some serious homework, a bit of distro-hopping and finally settled on Linux Mint Cinnamon. You are right, sometimes (often) installing must have apps on Puppy was a challenge - this was a factor now that I was a full-time Linux user. As a full time (still newbie user), I wanted access to every tool in the Linux world in the easiest way possible. I didn't want to hit a wall that might cause me to consider using Windows again.
- account-5 3y agoI don't consider this very mini. Not when compared with the likes of slitaz, puppy, or Tiny Core. Or how this would be better that usb specific distros like porteus and slax.
- SchererJa 3y agoI thought of tiny core right away as my work uses it as a network boot image. It works great for that.
- devsda 3y agoApart from being a rescue os, what are some common usecases where it helps ? One, you can have your data/software literally in your pocket assuming that's the threat model you are dealing with. The other scenarios I could think of involve too much friction to stick with it for long term.
- wafer_thin 3y agoos for containers need to be small. eg Alpine Linux: the tiny os underneath a ton of docker containers has been downloaded > 1 billion times. But the website for miniOS seems to have design in mind which is at odds with this use case. Alpine's website is bland and unexciting - which appeals to me ;).
- ibz 3y agoReminds me of Slackware Live AKA SLAX and my days carrying a mini-CD with it wherever I went. Beautiful times.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoWhat I would like to see is a brief discussion of why one should use MiniOS instead of, say Puppy, Slitaz, Tiny Core, etc. I might try it out anyway.
- andreldm 3y agoIn their home page they state: "We make MiniOS beautiful so that you can enjoy using it every day and for any task. We pay great attention to every detail in the operating system", and there are mentions to Mandriva, Debian, even Fluxbox, nowhere Xfce is mentioned, it's almost like they are implying the aforementioned qualities are their merit alone.
- megatoaster 3y agoReminds me of the days I used to carry a ton of live ISOs on me all the time. SliTaz might have been my favorite. TIL initial release was 2008.
- ahungry 3y agoI loved slitaz - got me into linux!
- grantsh 3y agoOmg we went through the exact same phase...
- devl547 3y agoWe are currently trying to bring SliTaz back to life. https://forum.slitaz.org/topic/usage-of-slitaz-40-rolling/page/7 https://forum.slitaz.org/topic/usage-of-slitaz-40-rolling/pa...
- subarctic 3y agotook me a second to figure out if it was min iOS or mini OS
- nashashmi 3y agolightweight OS needs a lightweight website. It needs to work without JS. What in the world about the first page was so essential that it needed a JS version?
- crim50n 3y agoUnfortunately, nowadays it's hard to get someone interested without a beautiful website, and a beautiful website needs js.
- __bjoernd 3y agoAnd no one notices the name clash with Xen's mini-os [1]. We've come a long way since Xen and the Art of Virtualization [2]. [1] https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Mini-OS https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Mini-OS [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2003-xensosp.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2003-xens...
- musha68k 3y agoAlthough most distros should work out of the box these days (I think?) nothing beats these smaller ones for interested people and especially “younglings” to try out; “running from a stick”. My first contact with Linux/Unix was through fli4l [1] an open source boot-from-floppy Linux router with which I shared our family’s intermittent 56k dial-up (!) links back in the day (I believe from 2000 onwards it was a single channel ISDN line; what a dream). Then there was the famous Knoppix [2] distro; coming with many German computer magazines at least. So yeah, all in all I’m more of a *BSD “graduate” (main reason being man pages were usually of higher quality; at the time at least) but to this day my favourite flash’n boot distro is still Debian based “headless CLI first” GRML Linux [3] (came with pre-configured zsh way before it was cool, lots of networking tools etc, a Swiss Army knife for the sysadmin). I had been running an old underclocked PC with it as a router and for NFS - for years and only until somewhat recently. [1] http://www.fli4l.de http://www.fli4l.de [2] http://knoppix.net/ http://knoppix.net/ [3] https://grml.org/ https://grml.org/
- WillAdams 3y agoOne convenience which I miss is the distributions which would mount NTFS and allow installation into a directory --- very convenient and made for a very low bar of entry.
- xcrunner529 3y agoMine was PhatLinux (remember that?). I finally got it downloaded over dial up and a download manager after weeks on dial up. It was so cool to use.
- kiney 3y agoI also fondly remember setting up fli4l on a single floppy disk to share the ISDN internet connection over coaxial cable 10mbit ethernet in my parents home when I was still a kid.
- hulitu 3y ago> Although most distros should work out of the box these days (I think?) nothing beats these smaller ones This one (minios) looks quiet big. But the idea looks interesting.
- kwijibob 3y agoFor projects like this the first thing I like to look at is a ChangeLog. That gives you a sense of the momentum. If you click on the "News" menu item, you need to have Telegram app installed. :(
- galaxyLogic 3y agoDoes it come with sources and can it compile/produce a new distribution of itself? So I could modify the sources just a little bit and get a new version by executing a command like 'make' etc. ?
- suprjami 3y agoLooks like yes: https://github.com/minios-linux/minios-live https://github.com/minios-linux/minios-live
- squarefoot 3y agoCame for the interesting headline on HN, left after 10 seconds because of the horrible unusable webpage.
- Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 3y agoI thought it couldn't be that bad but... it's bad... Make it need JavaScript so you can make scrolling into a slow, clunky slideshow where the text has additional delay before appearing... Absolutely brilliant /s Good example of modern bad website design... at least in my opinion. Sigh... that's what web frameworks and the 10 layers of complexity are for right?
- Intralexical 3y agoHah! Nice. I tried to do this a while ago with MX Linux. Biggest thing IIRC was to disable swap and tune disk/buffer write sync thresholds, both so you're not burning too many write cycles and also so applications can get away with writing to "disk" without stuttering on IO across slow USB ports. The usefulness day-to-day is pretty limited, however, assuming you're just carrying it around and also have access to proper installations.
- pedalpete 3y agoJust last week I was talking about running linux from a tiny usb drive and trying that as an escape from Windows 11. My thinking was that rather than lugging a laptop back and forth from work to home, I would just have a computer at each, and just bring my USB key with. My co-workers said everything would feel slow, but with 500mb/s usb thumb drives with 512gb, I think it should be fine. I just might try MiniOS.
- fuzzfactor 3y agoFull live distribution ISO's can be prepared on a FAT32 stick and booted using Syslinux rather than the Isolinux bootloader used for the "DVD". Or you can use GRUB for an EXTx type volume instead of FAT32. Some of the major distributions are about 4GB now, and with most PC's having 4GB or more of memory, once booted the whole thing runs from memory, often with no default ability for further routine user reads or writes to the live stick once booted. Alternatively the distribution of choice can be installed to a blank formatted stick instead of an internal drive. Instead of run live from the USB where there is no default persistence to any apps you may "install" while booted live. It's not really that slow any more, the initial full write to the stick is usuallly the only frustrating time-consuming operation. Booting to the stick is also slower than booting to an internal drive, often not by much though, and once booted there is so much that then runs from memory, there are not that many additional reads or writes to push through the USB bottleneck. Get yourself a full-performance USB 3.x stick, something like Sandisk Extreme and a full size distribution will boot just as fast as something mini on a cheap USB3.0 stick: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/sandisk/product/usb-flash/extreme-pro-usb-3-2/data-sheet-extreme-pro-usb-3-2.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... These minis would boot reeally fast on a full-performance stick like that. Window To Go also does quite well once booting it from the stick has taken place. The latest Windows 10 32-bit ISO when deployed in CompactOS mode only takes up less than 4GB and it boots just as fast from a stick as a full Linux of the same size. Compared to Linux there is some lag in some operations since Windows does a lot more reads & writes during operation than Linux usually needs. Unfortunately there's been no new W10 ISO in quite some time, so the first Windows Update makes it use more than two additional GB of storage. Still takes up only a little more than 1GB of RAM for W10x32 if you push in that direction, but 32-bit can only properly access somewhat less than 4GB of RAM no matter how much memory you have in excess of that. This may be enough free memory for many uses still these days though. Even Windows 11 to Go without using compactOS, which uses about 20GB of drive storage to start with, runs just as good once booted. It just takes that much more time proportionately when booting to transfer more GB from the stick to the memory before you reach the deaktop.
- neilv 3y agoWho is going to use a distro from a Web site with a yandex.ru tracker?
- lionkor 3y agoThat's no different from a google or other big corp tracker. So, you either block it, or you live with it, but there is nothing about yandex that should bother you more than google.
- neilv 3y agoIt hints that the people providing the distro are likely subject to different pressures than the people who operate 99% of the sites we normally see on HN. (Those other sites unfortunately also usually use corporate trackers, but different ones.)
- usr1106 3y agoThe news link goes to Telegram and the channel has lots of messages in Russian.
- neilv 3y agoYou can also make your own USB drive mini-distro, atop Debian. With LilDeb, I made a layer atop Debian Live, including an optional mutable partition, and curated a package mix and configs for it: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/
- suprjami 3y agoThat sounds awesome but it's been 13 years since the last update, does it still work?
- neilv 3y agoAs the very top of the page says, I'm not maintaining it, and I preserved it online. It's an example of a way to make your own distro. Considerable work went into the `build-lildeb` script that is a single file to define the distro in a simple and lightweight way. (This was before Dockerfiles, so maybe newer then, but it's still practical.)
- suprjami 3y agoOh it's your project, cool. A current implementation of the same abilities is probably the source used to spin SpiralLinux. I haven't tried this myself but it at least looks possible. https://github.com/SpiralLinux/SpiralLinux-project https://github.com/SpiralLinux/SpiralLinux-project
- fuzztester 3y agoI had tried Finnix. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnix
- v9v 3y agoJust yesterday I flashed a USB drive with Puppy Linux and modified it to start Emacs on boot so that I would have my editor wherever I go. Looking forward to trying this distro!
- pjmlp 3y agoToday I realised Mandriva is no longer around, once upon a time Mandrake was my favourite distro.
- 123431162 3y ago[flagged]
- lakomen 3y agoIf I was traveling a lot it could be useful to have a Linux on USB always with me. But then I'd also like to have a backup solution Let's assume this would become your main OS. It would need to run on any hardware, that means support for l the archs, or at least x86 and arm (in the broadest sense). And it would need lightweight (in the actual sense) backups. I'm thinking about a backup station where you insert you main OS stick before you go to bed. It would have 2 drives, in case 1 fails. And an ethernet port (or wifi additionally) for external backups. So you insert it, go to bed and when you wake up you have internal and external backups. But I think that there aren't too many people interested in having their main OS on a USB drive. One might have to provide a cpu/ram/drive bay along with it. And there would need to be a simple drive swapping process and low cost case replacement option. USB should not bottleneck the data transfer rates. So I searched and of course something similar already exists. But not the way I envisioned it. A USB 3.2 to m.2 adapter, with its own power supply, and a sata 3 port where you can plug in a drive to create or restore backups. No ethernet port or network connectivity. My vision is a case, a station, that does incremental backups to 2 slot inserted drives and optionally to (configurable) remote targets in sequence. The USB port would need to be high quality. Would I support SATA? No, maybe. Initially only m.2 connectors.
- lakomen 3y agoI wonder if I could put this on an old peppy chromebook. 1660MB max sounds great. What am I missing out on? I currently have xubuntu 22.04 installed on it an constantly struggling to free up space for upgrades. Or what could I remove from it to free up space?