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."

Midnight Commander

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure exactly what your expectations of a "common desktop environment" are. But there is a floppy bootable linux that contains midnight commander, and midnight commander contains a lot. A syntax highlighting editor, the ability to use ftp servers as a virutal filesystem, compare directory trees, etc.

http://paud.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

I was going to look at your homepage [chalmers.se] to see what type of background you came from, if you might mean only graphical stuff as a desktop environment. However, I was immediately confronted with a warning that "The contents of this page may not be copied without my written permission." As looking at your page in a web browser makes a copy of it, I hastily hit the back button and cleared my cache. Please don't sue me, and I'm posting AC just to be sure.

There are limits

[TheSHAD0W]

Trying to fit a memory-intensive desktop system into a small space is going to be difficult because they're opposite goals. System 6 and prior MacOS did it, but only by using black-and-white graphics and not providing most of the tools you'd expect nowadays from a graphical desktop. I think even GEOS needed several disks worth of data to load its desktop. And if the goal is to allow novice users to operate small distros, they'd take one look at that desktop and go "ew! Linux sucks!" and switch back to Windows.

Embedded/Small Systems

[MonMotha]

There are many efforts to putting Linux (and other UNIXes) in places with limited amounts of space.

handhelds.org [handhelds.org] is all about running Linux on ipaqs. Space is a concern, of course, so various things are done. The conversion to Busybox has recently been made, saving almost 2MB of space as I recall.

There's also uClibc [uclibc.org]. The smallest I've ever seen glibc is about 1.5-2MB. uClibc clocks in at about 200-700kB. That's small. This is used when you just don't have space available, such as on the TuxScreen [tuxscreen.net] with only 4MB of bootable flash and on many rescue disks and floppy based Linux systems.

Remember you don't want to cut corners all the time. On your desktop, it's probably best to run the full-blown GNU utilities. They have extra options that, while not commonly used, have obviously proven useful enough times to be included.

However, if you only have 16-64MB to work in, and you want to have lots of other stuff, busybox is a very viable option that I would reccomend if you have trouble fitting stuff in. Don't use it when you've got gigs of hard drive space to play with though.