There are plenty of tiny Linux distributions. Damn Small Linux (www.damnsmalllinux.org), for example, weighs in at around 50MB and lets you do many of the things you can with a full-fat Linux desktop. Tiny Core (www.tinycorelinux.org) takes this even further, cramming a workable Linux distribution, complete with a desktop GUI, into almost 10MB of space.
Both of these distributions can be turned into fully fledged operating systems and used for email, web browsing and office tasks, but most people reserve them for emergencies. Linux is also a great troubleshooting tool, and even the most basic system can be used to restore boot records, recover lost data and rebuild a broken system.
Puppy Linux uses the OpenBox desktop, which is much smaller than Gnome or KDE. It offers an impressive array of customisation options.
But using a tiny distribution purely for troubleshooting means missing out on a large part of what it’s capable of. It can do all the same jobs you currently do on your main machine, only on a slightly smaller scale – and that’s a good thing. Tiny distributions are portable and succinct.
They can work in tandem with your PC at home, or be your machine at home while you’re away. You can use a tiny distribution booted from a USB stick on a public computer, or a machine you want to ensure isn’t touched by your data. Running a tiny distro from a CD or old hard drive could turn an unused laptop or desktop machine into the perfect device for a child, a school, or anywhere the value of the PC needs to be less than the value of the table it sits on. The trick is knowing how to get the most from the small distribution.
Choosing the distro
The chief characteristic of any tiny distribution is its size, and choosing a smaller distribution is going to involve a trade-off between the amount of space it takes up and the amount of software you need.
Your sweet spot will depend on what you need your distribution to do and why you’re not going for a full-blown installation. The size of the distribution will be dictated by how much space you want to use. In an age of cheap storage, it’s probably not worth looking for something so small it can only store Damn Small Linux or Tiny Core. As a result, we’re going to set a size threshold of 128MB.
This is still over five times less space than you get on a CD, and many multiples smaller than the average Linux, OS X or Windows installation. 128MB also seems to be the size of many of the free USB thumb drives that are given away as promotional gifts. This means it’s highly likely you’ll have a spare device hiding in a drawer somewhere. It just so happens that there’s a brilliant little Linux distribution that will fit neatly onto a 128MB thumb drive – Puppy Linux, which is currently riding high in the Distrowatch charts (www.distrowatch.com).
What’s brilliant about Puppy (www.puppylinux.org) is that it’s super stable and includes almost every feature you’re likely to need in an operating system. It also offers a fantastic selection of packages to install if you need to turn your light distribution into a monolithic installation, and because packages are so easy to install, you can replace the default choices with ones you’re more familiar with.
Even more impressive is its ability to run from a variety of media, and it doesn’t even need a separate partition for installation. If you run the distribution on a read-only device, for example, you even get the option to save all your settings and changes to a separate file that can then be written to a hard drive, USB stick or writeable disc.
Installation
Puppy Linux boots from a live ISO image that you can burn to a CD or mini-CD business card, or write to a USB stick. We’ve covered installing distributions onto USB sticks in the past, and Puppy should present no difficulties.
If you want to install Puppy onto a USB stick, just click on the briefcase icon when you get to the desktop. Unlike nearly every other live distribution, when Puppy boots, it installs everything into your system’s memory rather than reading applications from the boot-media. This means that when you launch an application such as a web browser, it should appear almost instantly, rather than forcing you to wait while it accesses the optical drive.
Puppy is useable without any further installation after you get the live image onto your boot medium. It’s also pretty good at guessing your hardware configuration, and the first window you’ll see asks the only setup questions you have to answer: which time zone, keyboard layout and screen resolution you’d like to use.
After that, you’re ready to go. As with all tiny distributions, the first thing you’ll notice is that the desktop environment is neither Gnome nor KDE. This is because these are the most bloated parts of any Linux distribution, and removing them from the equation saves a CD’s worth of data. Puppy uses a desktop environment called OpenBox because it’s dramatically smaller than Gnome and KDE, without sacrificing functionality.
Using the desktop
OpenBox might not look as polished as its fatter cousins, but it’s quick and just as capable. You can get to all the application and configuration options from either the traditional launch menu or by right-clicking on the desktop background.
Configuration options are minimal in comparison to something like KDE, but you can still easily change the desktop background (‘Desktop | Desktop settings | Nathan Wallpaper Setter’), the button and window theme (Chtheme GTK theme chooser), the layout and setup of the panel (Fbpanel configuration) and the behaviour of OpenBox itself (OpenBox Configuration Manager).
These tools are easy to use and offer just as many options as the most popular desktops. Some, like the background changer, offer features you won’t find anywhere else, such as procedural backgrounds. Second to the importance of the desktop is how you manage your files, and most tiny Linux distributions use a standalone application for a file manager.
Puppy uses something called Rox-Filer. This is the application that appears when you click on the ‘File’ home icon on the top right of the default desktop. It works in a similar way to any other, larger file manager, letting you switch between an icon and list view, preview images, copy and create files and folders and perform custom actions, for example. It scans the contents of directories in the background, multi-tasks file operations, mounts remote filesystems and supports drag-and-drop.
What’s unusual is that it uses a single click as the default mouse action, which means when you click once on a file, like a PDF, the reader application will open immediately. If you don’t get on with this feature, you can change this behaviour by right-clicking within the application window, selecting ‘Options’ and disabling single-click navigation on the first window that appears.
Applications
A similar approach is taken with the standard desktop application, where the large and bloated popular titles are replaced with more modest executables that still provide a large chunk of the same functionality.
Many tiny distributions make exactly the same choices. The four launch icons on the desktop that provide quick access to the main actions are called ‘Write’, ‘Calc’, ‘Paint’ and ‘Draw’. Clicking on ‘Write’ will open Abiword, which is a fantastic replacement for Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org’s Writer. It’s fast, easy to use, and supports ODF and DOC formats for loading and saving files.
You get similar comprehensive, cross-platform support from the spreadsheet application, Gnumeric, which is launched from the ‘Calc’ icon. Like Abiword, Gnumeric is a fantastic alternative to the bloated tools that are usually offered, and for 99 per cent of users, it will be more than adequate.
Email is handled by Sylpheed, which should feel familiar if you’ve ever used Gnome’s Evolution or Microsoft Outlook. When Sylpheed first launches, you’re asked to configure your email account. You can choose POP and IMAP protocols, and Gmail users get a little extra help, because the default values are for accessing Google’s servers.
Web browsing is handled somewhat differently, because Puppy hasn’t wasted any space installing a browser you might not use. Instead, when you click the ‘Browser’ icon on the desktop, a small window appears that asks you which browser you’d like to install. Firefox and its Debian-ported cousin, Seamonkey, will take 15MB of space. Opera wants 16MB, while Chromium asks for 23MB. You can even install a security conscious version of Chrome, dubbed ‘Iron Chrome’, if you can spare the 27MB it needs.
With SFS package files for Puppy, you don’t have to worry about using a package manager. If the file is for your version of Puppy, it will already include everything it needs to install and run without any further dependencies.
Puppy includes a tool or two for most application categories. There’s a calculator, calendar tool, contact database, PDF and image viewer, and a picture editor. You can burn CDs, DVDs and even Blu-rays with a tool called Pburn, watch movies with the GTK frontend to MPlayer, and listen to music with Pmusic.
There are networking utilities that can help you get connected and accelerate downloads, and even a few games for those precious few minutes while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil. But the best thing about Puppy is that if there are any applications missing, you can easily install your own.
Package management
Puppy Linux has its own set of packages, which can be installed with a click using the Quickpet utility. Opening this from the desktop displays a tabbed window that includes a list of applications sorted by category.
From the ‘Popular pets’ page, you can install Audacity and Google Earth. The VLC media player can be installed from the ‘Useful pets’ page, while bigger projects are installed from the ‘SFS’ tab’. You can grab drivers for your graphics card through the last page.
Puppy uses a variety of package formats to install things, including simple TAR files with a checksum, Debian files from Ubuntu and its own SFS package format. There’s even a Puppy package manager, listing hundreds of other tools that can be installed onto your system, regardless of whether or not you’re running in ‘live’ mode.
The package manager can be launched from the ‘Setup | Setup Puppy’ launch menu, and you simply search for the thing you want to install, select it and let the package manager to the rest. As long as you’ve got the space, you can turn a tiny distribution into your perfect desktop.
Fix things with Puppy
Puppy Linux and its ilk are highly portable, which makes them perfect for troubleshooting a broken system or fixing hard drive problems on the go. This is why they nearly all come with some essential tools, including GPartEd for re-partitioning, Grub for reinstalling the boot menu, and filesystem-mounting utilities for accessing both Windows and OS X installations.
Puppy’s built-in firewall configuration utility is a good ad-hoc network security tool.
Puppy’s Utilities menu also includes tools for backing up your hard drive, and because you don’t have to mount the drive to boot the operating system, this is the perfect way of copying your data if your system starts to lose stability. The graphical disk map tool can be used to find any massive files on your system if you run out of space, for example, and there are a couple of batch renaming tools.
Puppy’s connectivity is also comprehensive, handling Ethernet and wireless, as well as data connections through the mobile network. With a comprehensive firewall and proxy server, it’s great for fixing networks while you’re staying at a friend’s house. If you need to run the distribution on older hardware, then there’s even a special version of Puppy that includes an older version of the kernel. Search for the ‘retro’ kernel edition of the distribution. This should let it run on any PC that has a USB port and will turn on.
Spotlight on… Tiny alternatives
Linux distributions can be any size. The smallest functional distribution is called Tiny Core (www.tinycorelinux.com), but this requires extra packages if you want to use it on a day-to-day basis, making it larger than some of its competitors. Another option is to use an older distribution – not too long ago, many of them fitted onto a single CD.
If your hardware is around the same age of the distribution, it may be a good fit. There are more popular tiny distributions to consider. Damn Small Linux hasn’t been updated for a while, but still offers plenty of functionality and is considered almost a standard for small distros. If you need something more like Ubuntu, but without the bloat, Crunchbang Linux and Lubuntu are lightweight, but with the same hardware support and package management.
SliTaz is a 30MB distribution with thousands of packages, and includes a running web server.
If your interest is more in servers than desktop use, you can’t beat SliTaz (www.slitaz.org/en). It’s a 30MB download and includes many servers installed by default, including a fully functional web server, along with both PHP and CGI support. 30MB is barely enough to install Apache on Ubuntu, let alone getting it running your website, and if that isn’t enough, you can also install any of the 2,600 packages that have been custom-built for Slitaz through its own package manager.