Review/Overview of Lightweight Linux Distros

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.

Why not Debian?

[Hatta (162192)]

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?

[jonnythan (79727)]

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?

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

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.

Re:

[mrmeval (662166)]

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:

[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?

[owlman17 (871857)]

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.

Re:Why not Debian?

[Workaphobia (931620)]

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.

Arch Linux for me

[by Anonymous Coward]

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

[torpor (458)]

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 ..

Re:

[Gazzonyx (982402)]

You mean, you're remaking Slackware? *ducks*

Re:

[chunk08 (1229574)]

Why are there always these offtopic references to "ducks" at the end of otherwise humorous posts?

Re:2 things needed in lightweight linux

[rts008 (812749)]

Because ducks are funny. It's like putting icing on the cake, or something.
It also encourages the continuation of funny ducks.
Where would we be without Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, or Howard the Duck?

*ducks*

DSL may be ugly, but it gets the job done

[langelgjm (860756)]

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:

[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

Re:

[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

Should have included FreeBSD. :)

[argent (18001)]

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.

Xubuntu

[thsths (31372)]

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

[the_rajah (749499)]

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.

Each distro reviewed has a nice niche

[masinick (130975)]

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?

[temcat (873475)]

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?

[kevind23 (1296253)]

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.

Re:

[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.

Re:

[chunk08 (1229574)]

Did anyone else loose confidence

No, I keep mine chained to the fenceposts at all times.

Re:More RAM, Batman.

[hey! (33014)]

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.

Re:

[just_another_sean (919159)]

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