Hello,

This is probrably impossible, but i want to install slackware with networking and mpg321 on a 32mb cf card.

Am i right in thinking this?


Thanks

From the slackware website
Slackware Linux doesn't require an extremely powerful system to run (though having one is quite nice :). It will run on systems as far back as the 486. Below is a list of minimum system requirements needed to install and run Slackware.

* 486 processor
* 16MB RAM (32MB suggested)
* 100-500 megabytes of hard disk space for a minimal and around 3.5GB for full install
* 3.5" floppy drive

Additional hardware may be needed if you want to run the X Window System at a usable speed or if you want network capabilities.

Are there any other distos that *could* do this?

you could do it.. don't let any specifications fool you..

that said, I can't really help you. you just need to know what you're doing and have much luck.

it is possible, there just won't be too much slackware in it if you want it on a 32 meg card. just know that it will largely be a do-it-yourself job if you do it with slackware instead of some distro meant to be teeny.

in fact.. you might be better off compiling a kernel and software from scratch on a working box and getting that to work.

You're not actually looking for a distro, per se. What you want is a microdistro, and probably the easiest way to find one is to make it.

Am I correct in assuming that this is going to be running on a specific device, with a known network card, known sound card, and a known way to access it via networking? Say a custom-built portable MP3 player of some sort?

All you really need is a kernel, mpg321, sound/network drivers (which can be in the kernel), and whatever server you need to be able to connect to the device, such as samba and/or telnet. Don't even need SSH, if you're doing what I think you're doing. You could do that with a custom micro-distro in about 2mb of space, maybe less.

That said, there are pre-built micro-distros that'll fit in 32mb. There's also a number of embedded micro-OS's that can do what you're looking for, but aren't specifically Linux. QNX jumps to mind, for example.

movix is slackware based, has mplayer, which is better than mpg123 and has a network support
http://movix.sourceforge.net/

i'm curious to know if you get slack to work on that card. you'd probably have to take the strict minimum from a and exactly what you need from n. i can't see you having much more than that.

You could do it with slack. All you need to have a working system is the required packgaes in a/ and the glibc package in l/. You would then cut back on the size by compiling a new kernel with only support for you hardware and removind all the man, docs, and header files.

If you had 64MB card it would be easy. With a 32MB card you might have to fiddle around and see what else you can get rid of.

Oh I've tried booting from just required a/ packages and it failed. I forgot to include the glibc package in l/and it worked fine. It was was below 100 MB but I forget exactly how much. For 32 you are going to have to get a little creative.

Hmm,

interesting, I've been googling a bit and found Busybox , this should be much smaller than slack.

http://amigolinux.org/docs/minstall/index.htm

This might be of some help.

"SLAX is not pretentious, nevertheless it requires some minimal hardware to run properly. It depends on what do you wish to use SLAX for, of course. The most important thing is memory. You need at least 30 MB of RAM to boot slax. "
http://slax.linux-live.org/requirements.php

Maybe you could strip Damn Small Linux (50 MB) down to 32?

Cheers, Leon.

I was going to suggest that, or Puppy Linux, another remarkable, tiny Linux implementation, though I tend to think that DSL is prettier, Puppy is ridiculously fast.

What you want to do is not terribly difficult with Slackware, though it will involve some custom work.

Personally, I use a slimed down version of Slackware on my own personal embedded devices.

I use the Slackware installer to get in the primary packages, then change out to a newly compiled monolithic kernel, and start pulling out any documentation or other fluff that isn't necessary.

My version of Slackware only takes up 8 MB on the 32 MB CF card it is held on. It is however compressed. So when it decompresses into a RAMDisk, it is around 32 MB in memory (which means you would want ~64 MB of RAM to run it happily).

Now, to be fair, my installation has no sound support or any media players. It is setup for network testing, and a minimalistic server.

But even with that, if the sound card modules are compiled into the monolithic kernel, the various console media players really don't take too much space (though mplayer does have a lot of dependencies).