So yesterday I decided to play with a new linux distro. It's called TinyCore, and it's developed by the ex lead developer of Damn Small Linux, and has a philosophy whereby the operating system should be clean and pristine at every boot. The initial download is only 11 MB, which is enough to get you into an X session with a window manager. Getting a basic basic set up running on a USB key was easy enough following the instructions on the wiki.
Setting up persistence however, was not quite as quick and easy as the instructions say. For instance, for my TCE folder and my persistent home, to use UUID or LABEL so that I can plug the USB key into any old computer and not have to worry about whether or not my key is still sdb1, required an extra boot flag, waitusb=7. The core tools are all busybox, but it's simple enough to install the coreutils tcz package, if you'd rather a more familiar set of tools.
I also had some trouble with my wireless card. My laptop is a Compaq Presario CQ40, or something along those lines. I couldn't for the life of me find any documentation that would tell me what model graphics card is installed in the thing. In the end, that was relatively simple information to find, though. Install the pciutils tcz package, and then type lspci at the command prompt. Down near the bottom of the output was Broadcom 4312. It was only a small leap from there to realise I needed the wl package to get the right drivers.
I haven't got sound up and running yet, but I do have the tools installed so that I can do so when I get home. All in all, so far I have sound, web browser, text editor, music player, and wireless - almost everything for a basic setup - in just 25MB. Now to me, that's an impressive amount of functionality in such a small space. And did I mention it's fast?
I do a lot of development in Python these days, so after sound, next on my todo list is to get Python + Django set up for dev stuff. I'm assuming python will be as simple as installing most other things. Maybe with Django, I'll get a chance to play with creating my own package?
There's also the matter of a JVM and Flash. I like Youtube, and I've been toying with the idea of learning Scala. Discussions for another day though. My opinion of TinyCore for now, is pretty good, though. Probably not good for a first time linux user, but for someone with a bit of experience, it is small, fast, simple, and the only things on your system are the things you want on your system.