Ultra Fast, Ultra Small Linux? How?

[CaptainKahuna]

I'm kinda new to Linux, but I've heard it's awesome, and I'm willing to give it a try. Can someone tell me how to minimize the footprint (preferably under 50MB) and have warp speed boot time(and I mean a matter of 20 seconds or so). Is this even possible for a newbie?

 

[CaptainKahuna]

Also, all it has to do is play mp3s

 

[n0cmonkey]

zipslack

I think at work we have gotten OpenBSD under 70MB, but I havent looked at it. There are plenty of small Linux/BSD projects out there. emBSD, picoBSD, LRP, coyote linux (?), etc. google.com/linux is your friend.

 

[CaptainKahuna]

I wanted to do Linux becuase I need to use XMMS because of a certain critical plugin for XMMS/Winamp.

 

[Nothinman]

Good luck fitting X in a box with only 50M of disk space.

 

[n0cmonkey]

mpg321 will fit, and its a great mp3 player. FreeBSD and OpenBSD both have XMMS ports anyways. I was just mentioning them as examples. zipslack is definitely linux though.

 

[singh]

I think there are DOS mp3 players out there. What could be smaller than DOS

 

[CaptainKahuna]

50megs was just a guess, it could be anywhere up to 500, but I was mainly looking for sub 20 second boot.

 

[Derango]

you can't fit linux+X+XMMS into 50MB....500 is more like it if you realy slim it down. The thing about linux is that most distro's include every piece of software you're ever going to need...so even though a full install is 1-2GB, it includes all of the programs you're going to use as well...unlike windows.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: CaptainKahuna
I wanted to do Linux becuase I need to use XMMS because of a certain critical plugin for XMMS/Winamp.

What plugin is that? If you could use DOS, that would be great. DOS is like what, 120K?

 

[CaptainKahuna]

500 is fine, I just want to make it as small as possible while having X and XMMS. Again, boot time is king in this situation. I'm using it in my car to play music, so I don't want to already be at the market by the time the computer boots and the music starts. The HDD is 5 gigs, so I could even give a full gig to the OS, leaving 4 for mp3s.

I just guessed that a linux install with only X and XMMS would be relativly small.

Also, does compiling a custom kernel really speed boot?

 

[CaptainKahuna]

Chaotic42, it's a plugin for my character LCD display, see above post.

 

[smp]

Whatever way you end up going, I think that turning off all services you don't need would speed up your boot ... but I guess that's a given.

 

[lowtech1]

It depend on what kind of job you want th OS to do, but you could get funtional linux to boot your system under 500k with neworking and NIC driver you should be able to stay below 900k. There are many funtional distro what work wonders as firewall at 1.6-1.8 megs. For a fully funtionall linux you could try www.linux.org and look for minimalist distor (check: Core & Beehive Linux).

 

[CaptainKahuna]

It's solely for playing mp3s using XMMS. See above posts.

 

[singh]

Originally posted by: CaptainKahuna
It's solely for playing mp3s using XMMS. See above posts.

If the source code is available, perhaps you could recompile it for DOS?

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

if you want a really small footprint just put win95 on there with winamp. Shouldn't take up more than 150mb.

 

[singh]

Originally posted by: Sudheer Anne
if you want a really small footprint just put win95 on there with winamp. Shouldn't take up more than 150mb.

Yeah, but he needs a really fast load time. Depending on how fast the PC is, the boot time could be cut to around 20 secs, but DOS is the only sure-fire way (3 sec boot time )

 

[lowtech1]

You can play around with RamDisk & BootLoader for Windows & Linux, but it not going to beat DOS.

DosAMP

Mpxplay

DAMP - mp3

 

[Budman]

Why dont you try http://www.litrux.com , It's a bootable OS on a cdrom,this way you'll need 0 HD space.

 

[CaptainKahuna]

Guys, boot time is key, thats what I'm really going for. DOS is out of the question because I need to use that plugin, as well as the fact that there aren't reliable DOS drivers for my sound card. I think that sorta puts floppy and CDROM distros outta the picture, unless I copy them to the HDD. Also, I don't think RAMdisk will work because the computer won't have continuos power, as I can't have it draining my car battery.

I need a bare bones linux install, which I think I can do with Mandrake, but I really need to know how to tweak it for fastest boot(sub 20 sec). Any ideas?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Compact flash.

 

[lowtech1]

Boot time is also depend on your hardware. The Debian linux (34 megs for desktop/testing machine & 42-44 megs for Database server) system that I setup for for work boot in less than 1 min with an old raid 5 disk & dual Pentium pro 200 with 64 meg of ram.

 

[CaptainKahuna]

Dude, I need to do this using what I already have, I'm not made of money. Got any recommendations on how to do it with a standard HDD? I need tweaks, not new hardware.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: CaptainKahuna
Dude, I need to do this using what I already have, I'm not made of money. Got any recommendations on how to do it with a standard HDD? I need tweaks, not new hardware.

Disable all services. Remove all unnecessary drivers from the kernel. Delete all the extra stuff you dont need. over clock your hard drive to be faster than 15k. Make sure the linux install is on the part of the hard drive that is the easiest and fastest to get information off of. Bam. You got it.

Or spend $50 or so for a compact flash setup.