Re: SEUL: Re: Minilinux (fwd)

[William T Wilson <fluffy@benatar.dunadan.com>]

On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, Star's End wrote:

> Would such a stripped down version be suitable for our base system or
> would we be missing to many things. Generally What I consider the
> absolute minimum for a linux system is what is on my root partition and
> it as about 100 Megs. 

I don't recommend trimming the system down in this way.  Our goal is not
to make the smallest possible distribution, but to make the simplest
possible distribution.

I believe we are assuming that everyone will be installing either from CD
or via a network, therefore, size of distribution is not an issue.
However, a useful feature would be to take a page out of the old
Slackwares, the all time installation champions, and include a "live"
filesystem on the CD.  Then users can install a minimal (50MB?) system on
a UMSDOS filesystem to store the contents of / and /home and leave
everything meaningful on the CD.  That's the best way to go about it, if
one of our goals is to provide a version that installs anywhere.

Of course, this sort of thing also brings with it the eternal curse of
slackware; it gets out of date in a big hurry.