Spec me a new Linux distro

Auraomega

Auraomega

Auraomega

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22 Sep 2009
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Leicester
Right, I'm looking for a minimal distro that's quick to boot into and next to nothing in size. Command line only, should have a recent (preferably latest) GCC compiler, gzip, the ability to mount flash drives and FAT support out of the box as I don't want to spend time setting things up. If it could install Gujin it would be a bonus but it's not required. Anything else will remain unused as this is only to be a portable compiler for my hobby OS while I work towards a native compiler.

Cheers :D
 
tntcoder said:
Arch or failing that Debian :) Wont go wrong with either IMO as both can be as minimalistic as you wish.
Click to expand...

Arch is a good choice, but Debian definitely doesn't have the latest version of GCC out of the box (hell, I doubt that Sid even has the latest in its repositories!), but I'll throw in Gentoo or Sabayon as well - Sabayon is basically a pre-configured and pretty Gentoo with a choice of either portage or entropy (source or binary) package managers.

EDIT: pretty much anything these days supports flash drives and vfat out of the box. You'd have to pick something pretty ancient (or deliberately leave it out of the kernel) to not have this support.

EDIT2: Forget Gentoo - didn't read the "don't want to spend time setting things up" part!

EDIT3: Arch and Sabayon Core installs both take around about the same length of time to set up and you'll easily have a fully working system in a night with time to spend playing.
 
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Thanks for the replies guys.

I'm actually looking for something really small that I can fit onto an ancient 32mb flash drive, I should have put this into my first post but didn't think. There used to be many projects to get Linux installable on a floppy drive but understandably many have been stopped, there have also been many small distros but they are slow to update. I'm hoping to run as a live install hence why I want everything running out the box, as for GCC my current compiler is from Ubuntu 8.10 live which works fine, but I'm aware of bugs that can affect kernel compiles on this, newer versions have been fixed.

And a new requirement because it slipped my mind, NASM is needed because of the assembly (although if needs be I can compile on my PC, it's just very tedious and I can't make clean on Linux then). If this can only be achieved by installing and not running live then so be it, I can't imagine it's a common app.
 
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