The Swiss Army Knife of Linux? 39
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."
Swiss army knife?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Swiss army knife?! (Score:5, Informative)
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: Perl Power Tools (Score:4, Informative)
SiCE [netfirms.com]
Re:Swiss army knife?! (Score:1)
{2:1009 ->}$ uname -a
Linux screamapillar.localdomain 2.4.19 #1 Sun Sep 29 18:01:23 MDT 2002 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux
<(flikx[0]@screamapillar ~)>
{2:1010 ->}$ ll -h
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10K Sep 6 15:41
---
[flikx2:~] flikx% uname -a
Darwin flikx2.tacc.utah.edu 6.2 Darwin Kernel Version 6.2: Tue Nov 5 22:00:03 PST 2002; root:xnu/xnu-344.12.2.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
[flikx2:~] flikx% ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 20344 Nov 12 09:48
---
{flikx(0)@sub2 flikx}$ uname -a
FreeBSD sub2.eng.utah.edu 4.5-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE #0: Mon Jan 28 14:31:56 GMT 2002 murray@builder.freebsdmall.com:/usr/src/sys/compi
{flikx(0)@sub2 flikx}$ ls -l
-r-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 10224 Jan 28 2002
Re:Swiss army knife?! (Score:2, Informative)
http://musenki.com/pipermail/musenki-dev/2002-Apri l/000003.html [musenki.com]
Re:Swiss army knife?! (Score:1)
Sure I have. He wrote _The Grifters_, right? And _The Killer Inside Me_?
Jim Thompson rocks. And I'm really glad to finally use something from that English degree here on Slashdot.
--saint
Re:Swiss army knife?! (Score:1, Informative)
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
Re:Swiss army knife?! (Score:2)
perl5 won't fit on a floppy anymore. Yes, the main executable will --
but all the modules won't, and perl isn't *nearly* as much fun without the modules. Yes, I guess you could still use perl4, but it's hard trying to write anything for perl4 now.But if you do want your basic *nix utilities written in perl, search for `ppt perl power tools' and you'll find lots of them, already written for you. I wouldn't really call it a good way to save disk space, but I have found them useful in the past (mostly as examples, because I do most of my programming in perl.)
Putting an installer on a single floppy is hard. In fact, putting anything useful on a single floppy is hard (and kudos to those that have done so!) but I hope the floppy dies out soon. I hate floppies. Hate hate hate. Don't hold squat, and are so unreliable -- my daughter (age 1.5) takes a while to destroy a CD, but a floppy she ruins in 15 seconds flat :)
I highly recommend (Score:4, Funny)
Some user configuration is required, of course.
Re:In my day (Score:2)
Midnight Commander (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Oxymoron (Score:5, Funny)
Heheheh. That's a good one.
Re:Oxymoron (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oxymoron (Score:1)
Re:Oxymoron (Score:2)
well (Score:1, Redundant)
There are limits (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:There are limits (Score:1)
Re:There are limits (Score:2)
Re:There are limits (Score:1)
Windows always makes me feel like I'm trying to use a brick designed as an answering machine for a calculator. It's just inconceivably stupid.
Then again, all that's purely subjective, so both of these posts are a complete waste of time.
Re:There are limits (Score:1)
Embedded/Small Systems (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Embedded/Small Systems (Score:2)
The idea was to look at what these guys who put Linux in sub-64MB spaces and see what they use. These people spend a lot of their time making the system to making it fit in a reasonable amount of space. If size is a concern, chances are a project has addressed it before.
Re:Embedded/Small Systems (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Embedded/Small Systems (Score:4, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Build your own? (Score:1)
next
Check out UPX, a binary packer. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Check out UPX, a binary packer. (Score:1)
I've run into this problem before, and couldn't figure out what the problem was. Then I ran strace on it, and saw it was execing a file in
Re:Check out UPX, a binary packer. (Score:2)
smallest X window distribution? (Score:2, Informative)
has lots of stuff
"Desktop Environment" and "Small and Efficient"... (Score:1)
... Are mutually exclusive.
If you want a small graphical system, just run a window manager. All of the extra (unneeded) crap that comes with a "desktop" is always going to be larger. Always. There's more there, therefore larger. So don't argue. :)
I have a vested interest in efficient software (Score:2)
Anyone up for creating a Yahoo! Group to discuss? Or does anyone have a better solution like some free mailing-list server?
We could chat as a community, and build a list...
I thought.. (Score:1)