Lightwaight Linux Distro

stromonic

Hello everyone,

I am looking for an extremely lightweight Linux distro for one of my projects.
Please suggest one, only if you have personal experience with it.

tetech

Alpine.

kassle

debian thx

alwyzon

I assume, you are asking for server distributions not desktop? If you want to stay mainstream, pick Debian (~100 MB RAM, ~1 GB disk for the system in minimal installation). That's already way less than what you will see with CentOS or Ubuntu. If you want to go further, pick Alpine Linux (a few MBs, commonly used for containerised environments such as Docker).

— Michael

terrorgen

I run alpine as a virtual router. Doesn't take more than 500mb.

rajprakash

I typically run Debian for minimal installs for both server and desktop.

stromonic

Can I run LXD on alpinelinux?

ehab

1. Alpine - virtual < 100MB

2. Debian if you plan to install k8s

CamoYoshi

Depends how tiny you wanna go. Debian Minimal knocks down the RAM and disk space requirements to around 100MB RAM and 1GB.

SliTaz still has common Linux packages and can run in as little as 24MB of RAM, around 2-4MB of swap, and around 80MB of HDD space (though it is typically a live distro with a "save" file a la Puppy Linux).

TinyCore Linux has similar requirements to SliTaz as well.

Hope this helps.

tetech

@hivalidity said:
Can I run LXD on alpinelinux?

Yes. I run Alpine as a LXC "hypervisor" on around 50 KVM VPS'es.

ehab

@tetech said:
Yes. I run Alpine as a LXC "hypervisor" on around 50 KVM VPS'es.

do have some links or some guide what/how/example setup? much appreciated.

tetech

@ehab said:

@tetech said:
Yes. I run Alpine as a LXC "hypervisor" on around 50 KVM VPS'es.

do have some links or some guide what/how/example setup? much appreciated.

I don't really have a guide, because it is in the repos so it is basically apk add lxc.

I suggest to put /var/lib/lxc on a btrfs or lvm filesystem, because making snapshots and moving containers is much easier. And there's some settings I change,

  # Set kernel userspace options
  sed -i -e "s/^\(GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=\".*\)\"/\1 vsyscall=emulate user_namespace.enable=1 namespace.unpriv_enable=1\"/" /etc/default/grub
  grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

  sh -c 'echo "user.max_user_namespaces=3883" > /etc/sysctl.d/99-userns.conf'
  echo "devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
  echo "net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
  echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Apart from this, most setup relates to networking so it depends on your specific situation. I run tincd on the "hypervisor" and allocate each container a private IP, so I've got a kind of "private cloud" (to use the jargon). But if you just want something simple like a NAT IP for the container, then it is the usual iptables forwarding stuff.

ehab

@tetech said:

this is very valuable info. i will try to reproduce.

vyas

Good list here

https://linoxide.com/lightweight-linux-distros-for-old-laptop/

Caveat : Focus seems to be on Distro with gui so some obvious names are missing

stromonic

@vyas said:
Good list here

https://linoxide.com/lightweight-linux-distros-for-old-laptop/

Caveat : Focus seems to be on Distro with gui so some obvious names are missing

Lovely. A GOLDMINE to checkout.