The Swiss Army Knife of Linux?

e8johan asks: "I recently found the BusyBox project that combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. As I look through the list of products and projects using BusyBox I find that most installers use it (RH, Slackware, Mandrake, Gentoo, etc.) As the footprint of this is very small, I came to wonder, are there any other smaller versions of common linux software. I found TinyX and the small linux project but I lack a proper desktop. Does anyone has a small desktop solution (like KDE or Gnome) to recommend. What I'm looking for is a proper desktop solution with common configurations tools, standardized IPC and common look-and-feel, not just another window manager."

Re:Swiss army knife?!

[flikx]

You don't even understand the question.

When you need to fit a full featured unix system on an install disk / rescue disk / embedded system / light hardware / etc., you need something like busybox. Sure, /usr/bin/perl is about 10K, but what about the rest of it?? And who the hell would write a full set of system tools in perl??

And furthermore, the submitter is asking about a light desktop system. My answer: IceWM, "just another window manager".

Re:Swiss army knife?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You may be interested in this thread, in which Jim Thompson (a real smart guy you've probably never heard of) explains his difficulties in fitting a tiny perl onto linux device with a small amount of flash space, for the purposes of running NoCatAuth. Jim lists all the files on his setup, and you can see how much bloated crap came along with perl.

http://musenki.com/pipermail/musenki-dev/2002-Apri l/000003.html [musenki.com]

Re: Perl Power Tools

[sICE]

PPT [perl.com] :-)

SiCE [netfirms.com]

Re:Oxymoron

[Bastian]

Not entirely. There is xfce (www.xfce.org), a CDE-like desktop environment. I used to use it on my old P133 w/ 16mb of RAM, and it worked much more nicely than Gnome or KDE, which kept my computer in a pretty constant state of swapping.

Re:Embedded/Small Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the project at paud.sf.net has a glibc that is 400k on it. Download and boot and ls -l /lib/

Re:Embedded/Small Systems

[grammar nazi]

My Iopener has a 16MB flash chip. All of the following fits with 1MB to spare (check out the JAILBAIT linux distribution at sourceforge)...

blackbox

busybox

esd

email client (i forgot which one)

Netscape 4.72 (that's right!)

USB ethernet drivers

mpg123

I forgot what else, but their were a few other cool things.

Build your own?

[Raleel]

Well, i don't knwo if this helps you, but I recently put together a desktop set up for some lower end pentiums. It consists of

1) IceWM
2) RoX
3) gnumeric
4) abiword
5) opera
6) gnucash
7) gaim
8) gimp
9) sylpheed

I also used redhat 8's backgrounds, although the actual software was mostly from mandrake 9.

Honestly, i'm not sure this is what your looking for anyways.

Check out UPX, a binary packer.

[kcurrie]

UPX [sourceforge.net], the Ultimate Packer for Executables is great when you don't have alot of diskspace available. It uncompresses binaries on the fly VERY quickly, so fast in fact that after compressing large programs you'll find that they are up and running FASTER than if they are not packed, simply because it can uncompress faster than it takes to load unpacked code from disk. It apparently can do something like 10MB/s decompression on a P133. ..anybody remember PowerPacker and the ilk on the Amiga? Those programs were worth their weight in gold when working on a floppy based system.

Re:Swiss army knife?!

[Anonymous Coward]

2diskxwin:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/natld

seems to have lots of minimalist X utils and apps

wm,fm,web browser, ssh/ssl, games (about different 6), terminal, taskbar, popup menus, dialogs, gfx stuff, all based around Xaw widgets, and the vesa X window system all compressed down to around 1.7Mb

theyre site seems b/w capped so problems occur if more than a couple of ppl want to download per day.

happy slashdotting ;-)

smallest X window distribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://freshmeat.net/projects/natld/

has lots of stuff