Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 103 posts

Re: An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

#81

Post by voakbasda »

eschneider wrote: post #3

Interesting article. For folks who need to put together their own distro, especially for embedded applications, Yocto and Buildroot both lower the barrier to rolling your own and getting exactly what you need to something quite reasonable.

Yocto does not have a low barrier to entry, at least when it comes to making lots of customizations and then supporting them over time (e.g. upgrades). If you are willing to climb its learning curve, it definitely would be my recommendation for rolling a custom system.

Re: An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

#82

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #74
slondr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As pmOS folks (and anyone running alpine on their desktop or server) will happily tell you, size reduction is not a goal only relevant to container runtimes.

today i learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS - "an operating system primarily for smartphones, based on the Alpine Linux distribution" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS "Alpine Linux was chosen as the base distribution due to its low storage requirements, making it more suitable for older devices. Excluding the kernel, a base installation takes up approximately 6 MB" i guess that would al…

too bad that device support isn't stellar :-( https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

Re: An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

#83

Post by pbronez »

bayank wrote: post #22
LeoPanthera wrote: post #5

This is one of those things that I've always been too scared to ask so I'm just going to ask it now: Is there a distro designed exclusively for running docker (and perhaps other) containers that also contains a friendly web UI for people who have no idea how docker actually works? I'm familiar with Proxmox, but it doesn't natively support docker.

Its paid SW, but I like Unraid OS for this. It supports Dockers, VMS, and of course an easy to manage hard drive array with parity and ssd caching support. Just being able to chuck all your old drives that are laying around, add them to the pool and bring new life to old HW was worth it for me. The docker and VM support are nice extras.

I’m getting a lot of mileage out of Unraid, but am frustrated by their documentation and Docker implementation. While the system is slick for loading community packaged apps, it’s non trivial to load your own images. their docs are mostly just forum threads.

I’m sure it’s actually very straightforward and I’m just an idiot, but I haven’t had much luck.

Re: An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

#85

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jiggawatts wrote: post #48

As a person who only occasionally needs Linux for specific purposes, something I‘d like is a well-supported mainstream distro for lightweight, high performance servers. Think NGINX, routers, local web proxies, that kind of thing. Something akin to BSD but Linux. Ideally something that supports a two-stage deployment where you compile for the exact target CPU and then the final thing has no extraneous components at al…

I'm sure nix could do what you're describing (if I read it correctly), although you'd lose the usual benefit of public binary caches, and might need to maintain some patches to cut down features. Gentoo also sounds right; pick the USE flags that describe what you want included, set your CFLAGS to target your CPU, and get a perfectly customized distro.

Re: An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

#86

Post by fsckboy »

iguessthislldo wrote: post #66
taylodl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to learn more about how you're using that Tandy 1000!

I'm honestly still trying to figure out what I want to do with it. I got the compact flash to use with a XT-CF-Lite v4. I'm still trying to figure out what DOS I'd like to use. I can get the OEM MSDOS 3.22 installed onto the drive, but that version's max partition size is 32MB, which isn't ideal when the compact flash is 4GB. FreeDOS supports that size and pre-386, but it was a pain to get it on there and is a bit ov…

if you have a working Windows 95 or 98 you can format /s a disk and copy the same DOS utilities over to it, and boot it just like a newer version of DOS. W95 is easy, W98 was a little trickier, or maybe I'm thinking of Me, I can't remember any more.

Re: An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

#87

Post by scns »

kccqzy wrote: post #68
carlsborg wrote: post #64

> since all of the read-only parts of openSUSE MicroOS have now been moved to /usr, the upcoming 4.2.0 release of transactional-update would also be able to apply new snapshots without rebooting Huge improvement, reboot to activate was a major downside.

But do you update the kernel without rebooting? Previously transactional-update can update the kernel and call dracut to make a new boot image. I suppose this still needs a reboot?

Canonical and Oracle offer updating a running Kernel as a paid service IIRC. One was called Ksplice, i think the one Oracle acquired.

Re: An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

#88

Post by teo_zero »

scns wrote: post #87
kccqzy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you update the kernel without rebooting? Previously transactional-update can update the kernel and call dracut to make a new boot image. I suppose this still needs a reboot?

Canonical and Oracle offer updating a running Kernel as a paid service IIRC. One was called Ksplice, i think the one Oracle acquired.

Please be aware that ksplice can only apply small patches to a running kernel. It can't replace the entirety of it with a new version.

Re: An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

#89

Post by eschneider »

voakbasda wrote: post #81
eschneider wrote: post #3

Interesting article. For folks who need to put together their own distro, especially for embedded applications, Yocto and Buildroot both lower the barrier to rolling your own and getting exactly what you need to something quite reasonable.

Yocto does not have a low barrier to entry, at least when it comes to making lots of customizations and then supporting them over time (e.g. upgrades). If you are willing to climb its learning curve, it definitely would be my recommendation for rolling a custom system.

Yeah, it's a bit inscrutable when you're starting out, but once you finally 'get it', it all makes sense and stuff is easy to find in the docs. Buildroot seems easier to start out with, but I like the Yocto features more myself.
Post reply on HN