Restating/Rephrasing the question - was [Re: A "green" distro of Ubuntu?]

[Richard Owlett]

Ric Moore wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-07-02 at 22:18 +0300, Janne Jokitalo wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 02, 2011 at 01:52:52PM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
>>> Not sure what page I looked at as to derivation ;<
>>> 50 MB still not "small" :/
>>
>> I really don't know how you can say that. Perhaps you are looking for some truly
>> stripped-down system, but I don't think any distro does what you ask
>> out-of-the-box. For instance, my ubuntu with just one kernel installed, has
>> this:
>>
>> jaska at lagavulin:~$ du -hs /boot/
>> 23M	/boot/
>>
>> That's only what one kernel requires, plus memtest86+ and the grub files.
>>
>> DSL is pretty small, for a modern linux distribution.
>
> If the OP is looking to use Linux for controlling devices then there are
> specialized machine tooling distros. Back when the only money maker at
> Red Hat was some little outfit in California they bought that had a VERY
> small Linux distro designed for industrial controls for tooling/
> industrial robots. I forget the name. It was just a specialized kernel,
> with some basic I/O compiled into it and a minimal editor to program the
> controls. They made it open-source and it became widely popular. Ric
>

First I would like say thank-you for the ~70 replies received.

Though I haven't been involved with controls &/or embedded 
systems since the early 80's, they do have something in common 
with how I work and think {single user, single task}. My current 
project is being built in Tcl/Tk. I find tclsh much more natural 
than wish - the event driven model drives me @@@ ;/

As to being decades behind the times, might not an Advance-Rumely 
be more suitable than an Astin Martin ;}

More seriously - system is 2.6 GHz Dual-Core Pentium with 3 GB 
memory and ~300 GB of hard disk etc.


looking for bare bones system (possibly CLI) and then use apt-get 
(correct term?) to fetch ONLY desired programs and dependencies

CD is "bloated" because it automatically wants to install "every 
thing including kitchen sink". I understand it can be trimmed 
later - but's not elegant.