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by musha68k·2y ago·view on hn ↗
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/

10 comments
Sadly, TinyCore [1] is hardly mentioned anymore when tiny distros are discussed, although still in development [2]. Maybe it's still just for a small niche of users, even after 15 years, but you can start with only 17MB's and add only the desired extensions [3].

[1] http://tinycorelinux.net/

[2] http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26201.0.html

[3] http://tinycorelinux.net/14.x/x86/tcz/

(not sure what their beef is with https...)

I do miss the times when their microcore was around 6-8MB's

it is IMHO the best distro for the USB drive use case, because the USB drive is still DOS formatted and you can use it as any USB drive. It's also super fast, because it runs on ramdisk, and forgets everything you did not explicitly save once you restart. It also has d-core which gives you access to all Debian packages https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=dcore:welcome
The "mini" distros were fun in the time of 128mb usb sticks, where you had to find some tiny distro to fit onto it...

But now, i can buy a 128gb usb drive for ~7eur at my local supermarket, why even bother with "mini"? Just install a full ubuntu, apt-get install everything else needed, possibly neded or just "nice to have", and you still have 115gb free for other stuff. Split the drive into two partitions and have one encrypted for private data, and you're done.

Strange the things that stick in your memory. APC magazine from mid-2003, Lindows OS Live CD on the cover, and somewhere in the text inside the corresponding article, “—pair it with a cheap-as-chips 128 MB USB disk for $70—” (that’s Australian dollars; and the wording may be inexact). I was always curious what kind of fish-and-chips shops they were going to where chips cost $70. And yeah, now twenty years later you can get a thousand times the capacity for a tenth of the inflation-adjusted price, and it’s maybe 10–100× faster for vaguely comparable units and loads.
"stick in your memory"

haha, great word choices in a discussion about memory sticks.

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.
Question for anybody who knows: what is actually the best way for younglings to experience computing these days? USB sticks were the thing when I was growing up because PCs were ubiquitous and people would accept trying it out as long as you promised it wouldn't harm their precious Windows installation. Is that still true, though? People seem to have more phones and tablets and stuff that can't boot from USB. Are things like Raspberry Pi the way to go?
Also wondering about this. Raspberry pi is probably a good way, yeah. Some others could be setting up an old laptop with Linux on it, or showing them how to hack a Chromebook (via crostini), or help them explore their steam deck which is already running Arch Linux.

I think the bigger question is how to inspire someone to be interested in open source. You’d have to find something that you can do in Linux but not in another OS.

Maybe show them how to host a web server. Or show them some screenshots of how cool a customized Linux desktop can look. Would be curious to hear some more ideas

> [1] http://www.fli4l.de

I remember using it (or rather a predecessor of that I believe) to turn a Pentium-II class PC without hard drive into a fully functioning router to share my broad band internet connection with a neighbor back in the early 2000s where direct dial-up was still a thing even with broadband. It was an easy, mostly pre-configured setup. We had to power-cycle the PC every couple of weeks because it halted sometimes but other than it worked like charm and was actually running from a single 3.5" HD floppy. (For the younger audience: floppies were looking like 3D printed save buttons. ;)

I also fondly remember setting up fli4l on a single floppy disk to share the ISDN internet connection over coaxial cable 10mbit ethernet in my parents home when I was still a kid.
Mine was PhatLinux (remember that?). I finally got it downloaded over dial up and a download manager after weeks on dial up. It was so cool to use.
If I understand this correctly, you are turning a computer into a router for another computer? Why would you do this?

I'm obviously a youngling

In Germany about 20 years ago people were still doing dial-up using a broadband (DSL) modem. The provider wouldn't give you a routing device but only a bare-bones giant modem. When still living with my parents I remember rolling off an ethernet cable across the apartment every night connecting my PC with the broadband modem and then invoking a bash script initiating a PPPoE (point-to-point over ethernet) dial up connection to the service provider. That was before WiFi and even before home routers were a thing. Probably back until 2002 or 2003.

Edit: This is how my first DSL modem (without routing facility) looked like: https://www.teltarif.de/arch/2009/kw27/10jahredsl-rueckblick...

I assume it was so they could share the connection among two computers
I had no idea that Grml was still around. Thank you for bringing it back to my mind.
> Although most distros should work out of the box these days (I think?) nothing beats these smaller ones

This one (minios) looks quiet big.

But the idea looks interesting.