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Review/Overview of Lightweight Linux Distros

Posted by kdawson on Tue May 27, 2008 01:20 PM
from the stacking-them-up dept.
Software Linux Technology
pcause writes "Here is a review of various lightweight Linux distros. Not sure I agree with the conclusions, since I am a PuppyLinux user, but it is a nice overview of some current options." Reviewed are: Arch 2007.08-2, Damn Small Linux 4.2.5, Puppy 4.0, TinyMe Test7-KD, Xubuntu 8.04, and Zenwalk 5.0.
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Submission: Review/Overview of Lightweight Linux Distros by pcause (209643)
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  • Why not Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hatta (162192) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @01:25PM (#23559655) Journal
    IMO, the best light weight distribution is Debian. A net installation leaves you with nothing but a console. You can apt-get anything you need, and only what you need. Why do you need a specific distribution for this? What does the Debian based Damn Small Linux offer me that plain Debian doesn't?

    • Re:Why not Debian? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jonnythan (79727) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @01:34PM (#23559767) Homepage
      The fact that you don't have to install to a console-only and not apt-get every package that you want.

    • Re:Why not Debian? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by SanityInAnarchy (655584) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Tuesday May 27 2008, @01:34PM (#23559775) Journal
      This should be true of any distro with a sufficiently advanced package manager and repository system.

      Gentoo starts out the simplest, with nothing more than a livecd -- you have to format yourself, unpack a tarball, chroot, and do the bootstrapping, pretty much all by yourself.

      Ubuntu has a variant which installs something about as minimal as Debian. You can always install everything else you need -- the bigger variants are as simple as "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" and such.

      Those are the ones I've used extensively. My guess is that the review is about how it all comes together for a specific lightweight UI and such, but I haven't read TFA yet.
      • I got hooked on Gentoo the moment I first emerged kde-base/kdebase-startkde and ended up with a blank, pristine desktop, without even a kicker.

          • With a K6 you really need a specific build (K6 is a brilliant processor standing on its own, but horrible at playing i386) and gentoo is how you get that build.

            Someone should build Debian for it, then.

            That's the thing that I didn't like about Gentoo. I discovered that most of the flexibility advantage that I perceived over other distros boiled down to two things:

            First, USE flags. Most of these are things like whether or not to compile Perl support for Vim, or gtk+ support for various packages, etc. I find that, for the most part, Debian-based distros solve this by splitting that functionality into separate packages -- often the extra functionality is in an option

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by scipiodog (1265802)

      IMO, the best light weight distribution is Debian. A net installation leaves you with nothing but a console. You can apt-get anything you need, and only what you need.

      A similar argument could be made for other distros, including Ubuntu - ie. an install without a GUI.

      Why do you need a specific distribution for this? What does the Debian based Damn Small Linux offer me that plain Debian doesn't?

      A less resource-hungry GUI by default?

    • DSL offers a live CD that's actually usable, supports network, and can be used to get used to the interface, etc.

      Personally, I have Zenwalk on my computer. I've been using it for over a year, after switching from Slackware. I love it. :)
      • ^My favorite thing about DSL is that (with sufficient memory) it loads the whole shooting match into RAM, so it's quite snappy.
        • It's snappy even if you don't load it to ram.. ;-) Sadly DSL is IMHO only useful in emergancies, since none of the included tools are very famliar to me.

          I mean using scheme as an Excel replacement, is abit hardcore.
    • I may give it another shot some time in the future, but the last time I tried a debian install (on my work machine, so I didn't really care as much) the installer didn't even give me the option to choose my desktop environment, sticking me with gnome when I wanted KDE. If there was a way to select individual packages, I didn't see it; instead I got questions like "What kind of machine do you want" with options for Desktop, Web Server, FTP Server, Samba Server, a billion other kinds of "servers", etc.

      Of cour

      • I may give it another shot some time in the future, but the last time I tried a debian install (on my work machine, so I didn't really care as much) the installer didn't even give me the option to choose my desktop environment, sticking me with gnome when I wanted KDE.

        There is a reason for that. KDE was (is still?) considered non-free because of its use of the Qt toolkit. Debian is 'pure' in its Freedom, thus you have to install KDE from a non-free repository.

        • Re:Why not Debian? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Workaphobia (931620) on Wednesday May 28 2008, @01:10AM (#23567247) Journal
          Dude, no offense, but what year are you living in? Qt has been free software for a very long time now, even though it wasn't free originally. Gnome is less restrictive since it's licensed under the LGPL, but reciprocal GPL fans can't object to KDE anymore.
    • Damn Small Linux packs a lot more usefulness into the same size as a minimal Debian installation.
    • Can it run on a Pentium 90 laptop with 32meg ram and a 340meg harddrive and be installed with only a couple floppies and wired network card?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Orange Crush (934731) *

        I'll see your Debian and raise you a copy of Linux from Scratch. Small, light, and does everything I need it to. :-)

        I'm unfamiliar with your needs, but if you want to rapidly deploy a reasonably feature complete lightweight OS to a menagerie of older donated/found/sitting in a closet gathering dust computers, it's easier to use a pre-made distro.

      • Re:Why not Debian? (Score:5, Informative)

        by owlman17 (871857) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @08:53PM (#23565537)
        Why was parent modded troll? My own Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org] setup weighs in at a little over 100 mb and it includes gcc, perl, python, vim, php, mysql, gtk+, some games, etc.

        From the website:

        When you install a regular distribution, you often end up installing a lot of programs that you would probably never use. They're just sitting there taking up (precious) disk space. It's not hard to get an LFS system installed under 100 MB. Does that still sound like a lot? A few of us have been working on creating a very small embedded LFS system. We installed a system that was just enough to run the Apache web server; total disk space usage was approximately 8 MB. With further stripping, that can be brought down to 5 MB or less. Try that with a regular distribution.
        I'm running mine on a Celeron 366 with 128 mb ram. It took about a full day to compile everything. (Would take far less on a modern machine). Ok, its not for everyone, but its perfect if space is at a premium.

  • Arch Linux for me (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 27 2008, @01:35PM (#23559799)
    Arch is a great distro. Sure, you have to do a lot yourself, but that's the point. By making you look over your /etc files at install, you get a good sense about what your system is actually loading during boot.

  • 2 things needed in lightweight linux (Score:3, Interesting)

    by torpor (458) <jayv&synth,net> on Tuesday May 27 2008, @01:37PM (#23559833) Homepage Journal

    1: Complete Development Toolkit

    Yes, thats right, I want a full compiler and development environment, first and foremost .. gcc, gdb, as, ld, cscope, vim, grep, python .. *minimum* ..

    2: FULL SOURCE ONBOARD .. and then I want the full source for the complete system onboard as well, so that I can run 'cscope -R -b' on /usr/src and have a fully working, 100% open source system, with its source on board, on a USB stick. Everything configured already so that 'make install' goes to my working image, etc.

    No, don't bother arguing with me .. I'm already working on it ..

  • DSL may be ugly, but it gets the job done (Score:3, Interesting)

    by langelgjm (860756) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @01:42PM (#23559911) Journal
    I agree with his statement that DSL can be pretty ugly, but it's very lightweight. I studied abroad for a semester and didn't bring a computer with me, but found an ancient Pentium-1 era machine that was being thrown out. It had Windows 95 on it, which would have been utterly useless; with DSL, I was able to plug a USB wifi dongle in it and get it working with ndiswrapper. Plus, if I remember correctly, DSL is based on Debian, so you can easily install the stuff it doesn't have (movie player, etc) with apt-get.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thsths (31372)
      > I agree with his statement that DSL can be pretty ugly, but it's very lightweight. I studied abroad for a semester and didn't bring a computer with me, but found an ancient Pentium-1 era machine that was being thrown out.

      Yes, I used DSL for similar situations, too. However, I have a spare Athlon XP plus board, a spare Nvidia 5200, and I am sure there should be a memory bar with 256 MB somewhere. You can put these in any ATX case, and make a damn fine Linux installation with the distribution of your cho
    • Good luck decoding and playing back video in mplayer on a pentium1. Mine had trouble with mp3 files. The stock distribution of debian should have worked fine, so getting DSL seems kind of an odd choice here.

      It's probably wise to ditch any P1 era machine unless it's absolutely needed and there's no other hardware to run. Those systems drink a lot of electricity for the amount of work they get done.

      • A P1 will do just fine for some tasks even now. A firewall, maybe a NAS. I would tend to stick to at least a PII.
        As to the power for watts. Remember most PCs today spend a large amount of their time waiting. Only renderfarms and HPC worry about peak MIPS per watt.
    • What are you talking about, it would have been useless? In 1995 I didn't have a dual-core powerhouse - I didn't even have a Pentium I, I was just out of high school and broke. I used Windows 95 on a 486 DX4/100, and you know what? It worked pretty well.

      • This was Fall 2006. Sure, back in 1996, I was using Windows 95 on a 486 too. My point was that Windows 95 on today's internet is pretty much useless. There wouldn't have even been drivers for the WiFi dongle I had. Installing DSL not only saved me some space on the tiny 4 GB HDD, it also allowed me to connect to a wireless network with a modern dongle.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Richard Steiner (1585)
          I built my main desktop box in November 1996 (Micron Millenia Pro2 Plus, a PPro/200 w/64MB since expanded to 192MB).

          It runs Firefox 1.5.0.12 under Warp 4 FP15 just fine, and dual-boots to Win95 OSR2 which also runs Firefox 1.5.0.12 just fine. Multitasking under Warp is much snoother, of course, but both platforms are able to play music, handle javascript, handle most Firefox plugins, run Java programs, and even do Flash stuff as long as it isn't too CPU-intensive (YouTube is not an option, sadly). Thunder
    • Wait a minute! A Pentium-1 machine with Windows 95 and USB? That is a pretty lucky find.

      I remember upgrading my old P-1 to be USB capable and having to upgrade to Windows 98 because Windows 95 wasn't compatible without installing massive amounts of service packs. I figure your machine must have been a top of the line model of late 1996 or early 1997 because if it was earlier, USB [wikipedia.org] wouldn't be supported by Windows 95 [wikipedia.org]. Any later and it would have been a Pentium-2. [wikipedia.org]
  • No, really, I'd like to see a comparison, because the basic FreeBSD install without Gnome or KDE is pretty small, and it's what I'm used to, so I'd like to see how he compared it to these supposedly small Linux distros, since I'm doing more Linux in my new job.
    • FreeBSD doesn't fit the profile, but if you have anything based on FreeBSD that is specifically made for small computers and with a desktop. I think this is what makes all those small Linux dists special, they try really hard to fit alot of things into a small space.

      QNX set the bar pretty high in this area with their browser+OS on a single floppy..
      • Have you installed FreeBSD? The installer doesn't use X11, and you don't even need to install X11... most of my FreeBSD installs don't include X11... they're all servers. BSD is based around a core OS that's pretty much only what eny usable UNIX system is going to need, and everything else, including the desktop, is optional. I don't know if you can still build PicoBSD (a super-stripped derivitive of FreeBSD) on a 2.0 Mo floppy, and it's sure not QNX+Photon... you can't shrink X11 down as small as Photon...
        • <-- batman provided links, So I'll comment there.

          All that is true for most Linux distributions as well, but many servers can very well have use for X11 even though they are headless. Maybe you want to play XBattle with your friends.

          Just thought I would give some refs, not sure why.. ;-) Debian boots easily with 30MB memory [coker.com.au], and with LVM and module loading disabled it needs 13MB.

      • FreeBSD doesn't fit the profile

        Whatchoo' talkin' 'bout, Willis? Have you never heard of NanoBSD [freebsd.org] and TinyBSD [tinybsd.org]?

        Not to mention Damn Small BSD [damnsmallbsd.org], M0n0wall [m0n0.ch], and the FreeBSD LiveCD [sourceforge.net]. (Among others.)

        BSD has had a history of focusing on compactness. Something which evolved on the Linux side out of necessity rather than as a stated goal. I don't know what the size of a fully modern FreeBSD installation is, but a basic install used to be as little as 60 megs. Heck, I remember running a fully-featured desktop system off o

        • I'll comment your response, since argent didn't include links.

          FreeBSD have a lot of virtues, but you still haven't shown me anything that is even comparable to the small Linux distributions reviewed in this article. I see a lot of tools to make those Live CDs, but no effort to actually build a usable live CD for ordinary people. I might be wrong, please do prove me wrong.

          <prejudice+experience> This is the saddest part of *BSD, there's so many cool things, but so little will to make it accessibly. *BSD

  • Xubuntu (Score:5, Informative)

    by thsths (31372) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @01:52PM (#23560069)
    Xubuntu is quite ok as a small distribution, but I think you would reasonably want 256 MB for it. Firefox 3 certainly uses a lot less memory than firefox 2, and that is quite important for me. And of course you need Adblock, because there is just way too much resource consuming Javascript out there.

    In general the start-up and shut-down process could be faster, though. I guess this is down to an the old laptop disk.

    • Xubuntu on a Celeron 466 w/ 256MB (Score:4, Insightful)

      by the_rajah (749499) * on Tuesday May 27 2008, @02:28PM (#23560595) Homepage
      I just installed Xubuntu 8.04 on that setup this weekend and it works OK. Hardly lightening fast feeling after coming off a c2d with 2 Gigs of RAM, but definitely usable. It's going into the guest room for, well, guests to use if they didn't bring a laptop of their own. Usually guests only need a browser, so it's perfect. If they need to print something, I've got networked printers.

  • NetBSD (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lgbr (700550)

    I use this [imil.net] NetBSD distribution. The download is about 63 MBytes, and runs incredibly smoothly off of an old 128 MB flash drive that I have laying around. It comes with X and the Ion3 window manager. Of course since it's NetBSD, it runs on damn near anything. Even more impressive, it detects all of the hardware on my Thinkpad T41, even my wireless. Need a new package? Grab the tarball from the pkgsrc repository, drop it onto the usb stick, and it'll be loaded at next boot.

    It's not easy to use for your typic

  • Each distro reviewed has a nice niche (Score:4, Insightful)

    by masinick (130975) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @03:14PM (#23561409) Homepage
    I think that DSL has a great niche working with really old hardware. The only distro I know of that is still actively being developed that is smaller than DSL is SliTaZ - very interesting, but very new.

    DSL has an old 2.4 kernel, an old Firefox browser, but you can count on it to work with old stuff.

    Puppy works with pretty old stuff, but really shines when you load it into RAM on equipment made within the past three years. Wireless support is something that Puppy handles better than DSL.

    Zenwalk has a relatively unknown, but fast package manager called Netpkg and a snappy implementation of the XFCE desktop. Derived from an earlier implementation of Minislack, Zenwalk comes out of a stable Slackware heritage. With a fast package manager and a fast desktop implementation, Zenwalk carves a nice niche out of the Slackware landscape.

    Arch Linux really is another distribution that once grew out of the Slackware space and has now come into its own with the pacman and AUR package management tools and the idea of giving you total and complete flexibility to build exactly and only what you want. It aims for simplicity rather than coddling the user with its own notion of ease of use. People really either love Arch Linux or avoid it for these very reasons.

    Xubuntu is an easy to use system with very current software from the Hardy Heron Ubuntu project, replacing GNOME with XFCE on the desktop. Good solid stable software with excellent wireless network configuration.

    TinyME is brand new, as far as a Version 1.0 implementation, but the project has been going on for a couple of years now as a community supported effort to provide lighter versions of the well regarded PCLinuxOS software. This one uses OpenBox instead of KDE. Like other PCLinuxOS systems, it really benefits from the good hardware detection algorithms from Mandriva and the solid packaging from "TexStar", expert RPM packager and founder of PCLinuxOS.

    As you can see, each of the distributions mentions has a nice niche. They won't all be appealing to everyone, but each of them is solid in several respects - certainly a credit to the modularity of both Linux and GNU software.

  • What, no SLAX or NimbleX? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by temcat (873475) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @03:18PM (#23561469)
    A pity that the author didn't review these two. Not only they are they compact and snappy, but they also include the full-featured KDE desktop environment. I couldn't believe how fast they are when I tried them as LiveCDs - and they can be installed on HD, too!

  • Xubuntu Arch? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kevind23 (1296253) <dodge...kevin@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday May 27 2008, @03:40PM (#23561809) Homepage
    Sorry, but Ubuntu or any of its derivatives do NOT qualify as "lightweight". I find it amusing that Arch was rated towards the end of the list, most likely because they couldn't figure out how to install it.
  • I am an Archlinux user right now... but if you listed all these on the IQ test from yesterday, and asked me what doesn't belong in the group, I would right Archlinux. They compared X booting live-cd distributions to Archlinux. Maybe he should try FaunOS?

  • Another One in the list: Mandriva XfceLive (Score:3, Informative)

    by imr (106517) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @05:59PM (#23563781)
    You can find its wiki page here (With the download links):
    http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/XfceLive [mandriva.com]

    Here is a review:
    http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2008/05/05/06/45/29-mandriva-linux-one-2008-spring-x [beranger.org]

    It's a community version but its package selection is in the official Mandriva tool to build LiveCD ( http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Draklive [mandriva.com] ) .

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Orange Crush (934731) *
      No. When you compile every application and dependancy, you tend to skip anything you're not going to use. The pre-made distros load all sorts of processes that a particular user may never touch. Knock those out, and you get noticeable performance gains from freed memory and clock cycles as well as faster boot and shutdown. Just because it's Gentoo and they're compiling their own binaries, doesn't mean they're ricers who think every little compiler flag is going to be some huge performance booster.

    • Did anyone else loose confidence
      No, I keep mine chained to the fenceposts at all times.

    • Re:More RAM, Batman. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hey! (33014) on Tuesday May 27 2008, @02:35PM (#23560727) Homepage Journal
      Well, I run Xubuntu on a laptop with 2GB of RAM....

      The reason is that I do almost all my work these days on virtual machines. There are all kinds of benfits from working mainly in virtual machines that I won't go into here, but the reason I use Xubuntu over Ubuntu is that it uses slightly less memory. Most of the time the performance of the virtual machines is not noticeably sluggish, but every so often you run into memory limitations. Using less in the first place means that it happens less often and recovers faster.

      Probably I should consider using a distro designed for some resource constrained machine, like DSL. However my current setup works well enough that I haven't been motivated to try DSL or some other minidistro. I'd be interested if others have.
      • I do the same with mine. I run a vm for a test web server, a vm with windows XP and a vm that acts as a gateway/dhcp/dns server for the other virtual machines. All of this is designed to mimic various aspects of the company's real network.

        For the host machine I use Debian Etch. I installed from a netinst disk and chose no mirrors during install so it was quite bare when installation completed. At that point I used apt to install icewm, xorg, gvim, iceweasel, pcmanfm, vlc and a few other things. Then I grabb

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