Just wondering if any of you are testing (playing with?) any new distros.

I am presently checking out TinyCore 6.2 & Antix 15-beta1.

(Used to also follow SliTaz, but it seems to have lost direction/fallen behind.)

Edit: My preference is for small, usable, live/installable distros.

I have wanted to do a CRUX install for a long time. And as I said in a couple of my other posts, I am looking forward to getting on with some BSDs. I am going to BSDCan in June in fact! :)

I also love small and lightweight distros.

Right now I am trying to see how small and lightweight I can make Opensuse. Right now I have around 400 packages installed and the system idles at 80 meg of ram with cups running in the background with openbox as my wm. cups uses about 6 meg of ram, so when I do not need to print anything it idles at around 75 meg of ram. But with alsa audio, ram usage goes through the roof, I start to idle at about 100 meg of ram.

so if we do 100 - 80 we get 20, that means alsa uses 20 meg! of ram.

I do not think I can get down to tinycore levels of smallness but I hope to get close.

(05-05-2015, 12:08 PM)cjm Wrote: I have wanted to do a CRUX install for a long time. And as I said in a couple of my other posts, I am looking forward to getting on with some BSDs. I am going to BSDCan in June in fact! :)

~Someone~ in IRC keeps saying to install bsd, then again CRUX looks tempting...

Stuck with Windows because of work. I've been experimenting with vanilla Cygwin (yuck!), Babun (okay-ish), and now MSYS2. I love how MSYS2 comes with Arch's pacman package manager.

OpenBSD + CRUX for ever :D

(06-05-2015, 03:44 PM)zr0 Wrote: CRUX for ever :D

Reminds me of what used to be said when Arch started to be the new cool distro ;)

I've been playing with void and morpheus recently. Not really successful though. Void package making system was odd to play with, and morpheus is just not meant to be a primary distro (still was fun).
I also tried exherbo and parabola recently. Didn't like much the exherbo package manager because I just don't want to deal simplicity with flexibility. For parabola, I wanted to make a "bootstrap script" so that I could create parabola chroots on the fly in order to try ditry things without cluttering my clean setup ;)

I'm also having fun with some sort of LFS, to learn how to linux, as well as working on a package manager. But that's another story ;)

By the way, for all of you guys that like small/light distros, you'd better try Alpine. It's a distro based on busybox + musl. Needless to say how small it is. Its package manager is pretty close from pacman + makepkg, so it works well.

been having a little fun at work with aboriginal linux

- build the simplest linux system capable of compiling itself.
- cross compile it to every target supported by QEMU.
- boot it under QEMU (or real hardware).
- build/test everything else natively on target.

(07-05-2015, 02:22 PM)xero Wrote: aboriginal linux

That's pretty interesting.

I myself haven't been doing any tinkering with stuff. :/
I might try my hand at an LFS distro.

I tried Alpine but honestly I feel like I'm not the sort who enjoys tinkering around with this sort of thing. I tried installing OpenBSD but my wireless wasn't supported, and Alpine ultimately just felt I was limiting myself for no real reason? I can see why people would prefer things like busybox and musl but I've got stuff to do and can't be asked to spend half an hour finding out why 'mount' won't work. I ended up installing ol' reliable, Debian.

I am having some trouble installing NuTyX. But it looks like a cool distro that is LFS based ( for some reason DistroWatch says that it is CRUX based as well ) that has a custom package manager that allows for the installation of binaries but as well as compilation from their own ports tree.

They have a make.conf that does not seem to emulate the idea Gentoo had in mind ( simplicity and just typing the name or package of the thing that you want or don't want ), it seems to look like a BSD make.conf ( with all of the underlines ).

Nutyx IS based on crux. Or at least, was. I talked with the guys (it was before they even release their "cards" package manager. And back in the days, Nutyx was a crux install with their own wrapper to prt-utils.

Now their distro isn't based on crux anymore I think