[HN Gopher] MiniOS - a lightweight Linux distribution designed f... ___________________________________________________________________ MiniOS - a lightweight Linux distribution designed for USB drive Author : akagusu Score : 83 points Date : 2023-10-04 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (minios.dev) (TXT) w3m dump (minios.dev) | nashashmi wrote: | lightweight OS needs a lightweight website. It needs to work | without JS. | | What in the world about the first page was so essential that it | needed a JS version? | devsda wrote: | Apart from being a rescue os, what are some common usecases where | it helps ? | | One, you can have your data/software literally in your pocket | assuming that's the threat model you are dealing with. | | The other scenarios I could think of involve too much friction to | stick with it for long term. | wafer_thin wrote: | os for containers need to be small. eg Alpine Linux: the tiny | os underneath a ton of docker containers has been downloaded > | 1 billion times. But the website for miniOS seems to have | design in mind which is at odds with this use case. Alpine's | website is bland and unexciting - which appeals to me ;). | giantg2 wrote: | Reminds me of DSL - Damn Small Linux. Only those were the days of | running on a floppy. | downrightmike wrote: | That's a name I haven't heard of in a long while | http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ 50MB ISO, last release was in | 2008, a year before the first version of MiniOS came out. | gattilorenz wrote: | muLinux (live distro based on a modular set of floppy disks, | including X11 and gcc... and somewhat questionable English | grammar) and the Knoppix CD and later DVD were pretty cool too. | Oh, and tomsrtbt, "the most GNU/Linux on a floppy disk"! | hiAndrewQuinn wrote: | Or Puppy Linux! The first day I popped that CD drive in and was | able to run the internet browser ten times faster than I ever | could on my decrepit family computer was a magical moment for | me. It made me realize just how much power was being wasted on | things I neither knew nor cared about under the surface. | autumn-antlers wrote: | I liked this post about Puppy Linux so much it's linked on my | home page (nvm that i dont have any other pages): | | https://artemis.sh/2022/07/15/decision-making-is-finite.html | | Might have less to do with the post and more to do with my | own fond memories of Puppy and it's community | anthk wrote: | Today I used the opposite approach. I began with Debian, | next SuSE8, Knoppix, Aurox, Debian Sarge for lots of years, | and, after OpenBSD, I use Hyperbola with a pretty sparse | cwm with uxterm, links+, and for music/podcasts I use two | scripts: sfeed_download, anonradio, tpradio and amused | playing my collections at random. No bling bling, almost no | features with sfeed. | account-5 wrote: | I don't consider this very mini. Not when compared with the likes | of slitaz, puppy, or Tiny Core. Or how this would be better that | usb specific distros like porteus and slax. | musha68k wrote: | Although most distros should work out of the box these days (I | think?) nothing beats these smaller ones for interested people | and especially "younglings" to try out; "running from a stick". | | My first contact with Linux/Unix was through fli4l [1] an open | source boot-from-floppy Linux router with which I shared our | family's intermittent 56k dial-up (!) links back in the day (I | believe from 2000 onwards it was a single channel ISDN line; what | a dream). | | Then there was the famous Knoppix [2] distro; coming with many | German computer magazines at least. | | So yeah, all in all I'm more of a *BSD "graduate" (main reason | being man pages were usually of higher quality; at the time at | least) but to this day my favourite flash'n boot distro is still | Debian based "headless CLI first" GRML Linux [3] (came with pre- | configured zsh way before it was cool, lots of networking tools | etc, a Swiss Army knife for the sysadmin). | | I had been running an old underclocked PC with it as a router and | for NFS - for years and only until somewhat recently. | | [1] http://www.fli4l.de | | [2] http://knoppix.net/ | | [3] https://grml.org/ | WillAdams wrote: | One convenience which I miss is the distributions which would | mount NTFS and allow installation into a directory --- very | convenient and made for a very low bar of entry. | squarefoot wrote: | Came for the interesting headline on HN, left after 10 seconds | because of the horrible unusable webpage. | __bjoernd wrote: | And no one notices the name clash with Xen's mini-os [1]. We've | come a long way since Xen and the Art of Virtualization [2]. | | [1] https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Mini-OS [2] | https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2003-xens... | vmfunction wrote: | with usb at about 256gb - 1tb now. Looking forward to a world | were everyone carries their computer in a usb. | Arnavion wrote: | Write throughput and flash lifetime are still a concern for | that. | lomereiter wrote: | You could buy a USB enclosure for an M.2 NVMe SSD - a bit | bulkier but still portable and addresses your concerns. | [deleted] | kwhitefoot wrote: | Laptops typically have 8 GB or more RAM which is a lot more | than you need of r a lightweight OS; perhaps the rest could | be used as a cache that is periodically flushed to the USB. | For most uses of such a device there isn't much writing going | on anyway. | giancarlostoro wrote: | This is one of those sites that hijacks your scrolling, which I | wish there was a standard for "please just let me scroll freely". | It's not super awful but its kind of annoying, I like to read | things on either the top or bottom edge of my browser window so I | dont lose my spot. | ploum wrote: | It is sad because I was interested but my first thought was "if | you can't make a basic usable webpage, how can I trust you to | make a minimal usable operating system". And I closed the tab. | JohnMakin wrote: | Did exactly the same! | demandingturtle wrote: | That's a bit harsh. If it was from a web dev company, sure. | But this is from someone doing it as a hobby for the good of | mankind. Yeah, the might not work for some people but it's | not the end of the world. It's like saying that girl has one | strand of hair out of place so I'm not going to date her. You | must be fun to be around. | dekken_ wrote: | it's super obnoxious, even when it's only slight sensitivity | changes (which it isn't here) I notice it and feel violated | Narishma wrote: | I also hijacks the back button. | Pfiffer wrote: | Real question: Why is this even allowed at a browser level? | MenhirMike wrote: | Because some people think that Browsers should be the | ultimate app platform, so hijacking your inputs or preventing | proper zoom makes sense to them even though it's utterly user | hostile. | giancarlostoro wrote: | Which has led us to regress in terms of building GUI | desktop apps. Remember the 2000s and 90s how you could make | a somewhat native UI in Visual Basic 6 and Delphi, now you | got to use an entire browser to get there. | nilamo wrote: | You can still do that. And it'll still only run on one | operating system, just like it used to. | giancarlostoro wrote: | Java didn't only run on one OS but for whatever reason | Oracle seems to find no value in making its UI stack | nicer and modern. It seems only Microsoft's C# stack is | working on this. There's also Qt, which is not a single- | OS solution, but its C++. | Alupis wrote: | Well, there is JavaFX, which is really nice for modern | java desktop UI's. However, Swing can be taken really | _really_ far - just look at IntelliJ and friends (most | people don 't even realize they're Swing UI's). | | With that said - most modern applications are webapps for | good reasons. Making native apps sucks for a lot of | reasons - including all the random OS-specific behavior | you have to work around, specific versions of native OS | libraries, etc. | | Building for the web browser means, without any extra | effort, you app works on all operating systems, and it | works exactly the same. That's a pretty good sell to | anyone trying to make a modern application that's mostly | just a front-end UI for an API... | duped wrote: | I remember UIs causing BSODs, horrible crashes, and | corrupting files too. | [deleted] | emchammer wrote: | It's not just browsers, though. I have to scroll harder in | News.app than in other MacOS applications. Real question: | Why do designers do this? | winrid wrote: | Webkit has lots of "advanced" flags. We should add this as | one! | Jeff_Brown wrote: | Jesus. As a visually impaired person who needs to scroll almost | line by line, this is horrible. | ibz wrote: | Reminds me of Slackware Live AKA SLAX and my days carrying a | mini-CD with it wherever I went. Beautiful times. | galaxyLogic wrote: | Does it come with sources and can it compile/produce a new | distribution of itself? So I could modify the sources just a | little bit and get a new version by executing a command like | 'make' etc. ? | andreldm wrote: | In their home page they state: "We make MiniOS beautiful so that | you can enjoy using it every day and for any task. We pay great | attention to every detail in the operating system", and there are | mentions to Mandriva, Debian, even Fluxbox, nowhere Xfce is | mentioned, it's almost like they are implying the aforementioned | qualities are their merit alone. | hk1337 wrote: | I remember running Linux on a floppy disk back in the 90s. Used | it as a NAT between the school network and my computer(s) in my | room. | | Pretty cool to see the functionality increase with portability. | Although, floppy disk space is significantly less than a USB | drive. | gpribeiro wrote: | Coyote Linux, maybe? I used it at home in the beginning of the | 2000s. | rzzzt wrote: | There's a famous single floppy router distribution: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project | | LGR has a video on a PC-based appliance (a wireless access | point) where the "firmware" source was a walled-off 3.5" | drive with a floppy inside. That one ran DR-DOS however: | https://youtu.be/DOkapxbW93g | hk1337 wrote: | I believe that was it but Coyote Linux sounds familiar too. | I think it perhaps used that distribution. | megatoaster wrote: | Reminds me of the days I used to carry a ton of live ISOs on me | all the time. | | SliTaz might have been my favorite. TIL initial release was 2008. | kwijibob wrote: | For projects like this the first thing I like to look at is a | ChangeLog. That gives you a sense of the momentum. | | If you click on the "News" menu item, you need to have Telegram | app installed. :( | O1111OOO wrote: | I love this. I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a | year or two (Netbook, load to RAM, save changes to USB). It was | the most comfortable I ever felt using a computer. I used my | laptop's HD as a pure data drive for large files only. | | Puppy encrypted the entire OS on USB. So it would boot fine but | needed to be decrypted during the boot process. | | It contained all my apps, system settings and smaller files | (docs, html, passwords, personal docs, etc) that I decided to | save in the encrypted OS/USB. | | The laptop's mounted HD contained the larger stuff... tons of | videos, pics, etc.. basically all the stuff I didn't really need | to protect/encrypt. | | Someone could steal the laptop and I wouldn't care (all that | large stuff is always backed up too on externals). Someone could | steal the USB and they'd have to know it was a bootable, | encrypted USB. Even so, they'd also need to know how to decrypt | on boot. I felt so safe even when traveling. | | I could also plug my USB into any laptop and BOOM! ready to go:-) | It was like a plug-n-play super-power. | | I saw MiniOS listed here and I immediately thought of my old | Puppy setup. Looking forward to giving this OS a spin. I hope it | considers my use case in their thinking (though I'm sure I can | tweak it easily to fulfill my needs). | kwhitefoot wrote: | > I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a year or | two | | If it was so good why did you stop? | | I used Puppy too a while ago but found that once I wanted to | run something that the Puppy guys hadn't packaged that it was a | bit more work to install things. That's probably not the case | now that there is a Debian based Pup, perhaps I should consider | trying again. | O1111OOO wrote: | > If it was so good why did you stop? | | This was maybe 14 years ago. I sold the netbook and started | using Windows full time again. I was still in this middle | state between using Linux and Windows - going back and forth | between the two. | | When I decided the leave Windows completely (Windows 10 | spyware release summer/2015), I settled on a full-featured | distro. I did some serious homework, a bit of distro-hopping | and finally settled on Linux Mint Cinnamon. | | You are right, sometimes (often) installing must have apps on | Puppy was a challenge - this was a factor now that I was a | full-time Linux user. | | As a full time (still newbie user), I wanted access to every | tool in the Linux world in the easiest way possible. I didn't | want to hit a wall that might cause me to consider using | Windows again. | tombh wrote: | Puppy was what got me into Linux! An old laptop was struggling | with Windows and Puppy just breathed the most amazing fresh and | sprightly life into it. That was over 15 years ago and I've | used Linux everyday since. | O1111OOO wrote: | > Puppy just breathed the most amazing fresh and sprightly | life into it. | | Yes! This was it exactly. Running Puppy in RAM on my old | netbook was amazing:-) | clnq wrote: | I'm probably going to make some Linux desktop guys mad, but the | page says "Attention to detail" and then proceeds to show very | many desktop window screenshots where the styles are very | inconsistent. Font sizes, margins around elements, menu bar | styles, title bar styles and naming conventions, one of the | windows has an application icon in the title, but only one, the | icon sizes are very different. What's the point of saying | "attention to detail" and then showing this? | amelius wrote: | Apparently, those are not the important details. | liotier wrote: | Indeed - different classes of users will have different | perceptions. I never understood why anyone would feel ruffled | by different applications using different UI libraries... | somethingAlex wrote: | It just seems odd in this context given they are willfully | compiling these screenshots together, displaying them | prominently, and saying they pay attention to details. What | details are they trying to highlight here, if not the UI | details? | | In general the UI doesn't even look good. It's just a bunch | of unflattering grey. | subarctic wrote: | took me a second to figure out if it was min iOS or mini OS | kwhitefoot wrote: | What I would like to see is a brief discussion of why one should | use MiniOS instead of, say Puppy, Slitaz, Tiny Core, etc. I might | try it out anyway. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-10-04 23:00 UTC)