Craig Sanders wrote:
On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 12:41:47PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
And these people actually _argue_ with me. DamnSmallLinux is The Right Thing because they can boot into the installer and hit the spacebar with their foreheads repeatedly and arrive at a (feeble, limited) Linux installation. Therefore, it's the right choice, say they.
Ah, okay. That explains something I'd never really got before - "what's the point of DamnSmallLinux and other tiny-distros when a debian base install is also tiny but gives you instant apt-get access to tens of thousands of extra programs already packaged as well as a dev team of over 1000 people, many of them first-rank experts in their fields?".
it's just perception and marketing.
Last time I did a PXE install of debian 6 into qemu, it needed 192MB instead of the default 128MB of RAM (possibly somewhere between those two), or some packages were not completely unpacked (which completely floored me, because the install CLAIMED to finish just fine). Once installed with 192MB, it booted fine with 128MB. The smallest I've gotten a rootfs + kernel + ramdisk for minimal Debian, is 49MB, or 23MB with a localyesconfig kernel. And that was using squashfs, so you'd need more RAM to actually run it. I think there *is* a gap between the smallest thing you can reasonably run Debian on -- about 128MB nonvolatile / 128MB volatile -- and your typical OpenWRT target (4 to 16MB nonvolatile / 8 to 32MB volatile). But I don't know you can buy devices in that range, and I don't think DSL targets it.