inportb

If you run a full Linux distribution on your desktop or laptop, you might have wished for a faster, lighter system when you did not need all the functionality. SliTaz might be the solution. I’ve been able to perform a frugal setup of this tiny distro with Ubuntu, without a dedicated partition.

Normally, I’d recommend Damn Small Linux. I recently discovered SliTaz and found it to be

1. lighter (28mb instead of 50mb)
2. more modern (runs Linux kernel 2.6 instead of 2.4)
3. easier to set up (just two files to copy)

While SliTaz normally requires very little memory, this particular setup is configured to run off a ramdisk. 160MB of RAM are required for operation, but we end up with a super-fast system. Let’s get started; we’ll be installing into /slitaz on (hd0,0), but anywhere else should be fine.

First, get the kernel and ramdisk into position:

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/boot/cooking/bzImage
wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/boot/cooking/rootfs.gz
mkdir /slitaz
sudo mv bzImage rootfs.gz /slitaz/

Next, add an entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title    SliTaz
root    (hd0,0)
kernel    /slitaz/bzImage rw root=/dev/null vga=extended lang=en kmap=us
initrd    /slitaz/rootfs.gz

… and that’s it! Just reboot and select SliTaz from the GRUB menu. I have not yet figured out an elegant way to make changes persist in SliTaz, but this is a good start.