[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Monday 18 February 2019

[aaronco36]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com> from [01]
> He also brought on the same sized disks SliTAZ 5-in-One release both
> of these are adapted to old machines with low memory. Both are on
> the very compact CD-R format sometimes called business card size

Sorry to have to be so nitpicky, but the "compact CD-R format" optical 
disks I brought are actually called "mini-CDs" and an accurate description 
of the 210 MiB ones I brought is the following, directly quoting reference 
[02] :
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mini CD single, a small disc. The format is mainly used for audio CD 
singles in certain regions (singles are sold on normal 120 mm CDs in many 
countries), much like the old vinyl single. An 80 mm disc can hold up to 
24 minutes of music, or 210 MiB (210  220 bytes) of data. They are often 
referred to as Maxi CDs in some countries.

** The low density version holds 18 minutes, or 155 MB.
** Other formats are 185 MB (21 mins), which has the same data density as 
a 650 MB full-sized CD, and 210 MB (24 mins), with the same data density 
as a 700 MB full-sized CD, used for "Pocket" data storage. (see also 
miniDVD)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Since the mini-CDs I brought have a 210 MiB capacity, there seem to be 
fewer and fewer bootable Linux ISO images that one can burn onto these 
disks, besides the bootable Plop Boot Manager [03] and SliTaz [04] CDs I 
provided Bobbie. To wit...
- Most, but not all, images of Tiny Core Linux [05] will easily fit onto 
both a 50 MiB Business Card CD and a mini-CD.
- Versions of Puppy Linux [06] from about a handful of years ago (ver 5.7, 
see [07]) and going back further in time all _easily_ fit onto a 210 MiB 
mini-CD.
- The bootable Super Grub2 Disks [08][]09] that Bobbie S and others have 
previously mentioned and used for "fixing" and editing GRUB 2.x _also_ 
easily fit onto a 210 MiB mini-CD.

Rick M and/or Michael P are welcome to jump in if I'm badly mistaken, but 
to my admittedly-limited knowledge, there is no "ready-made" "as-is" 
bootable ISO image of Debian [GNU]/Linux Stable [10] for i386 and amd64 PC 
architectures that is less than ~290 MiB in size.
Are Debian's downloadable "Tiny CDs, flexible USB sticks, etc." described 
at the bottom-left of [11] *really* to be considered as already ready-made 
as-is bootable images that could be directly burned, for example, onto a 
210 MiB mini-CD??
(I'm definitely among those who have some doubts on this latter point :-\)

An interesting distro besides the above that "might" be installable or at 
least usable in some fashion or another via a sub-210 MiB size download 
and subsequent burn to mini-CD is Alpine Linux [12].
Alpine Linux describes itself as "a security-oriented, lightweight Linux 
distribution based on musl libc and busybox".
Alpine Linux's "Standard" and "Netboot" ISO image downloads for x86 and 
x86-64 architectures [13] take up much less than 210 MiB, so presumably at 
least the "Standard" ISO images would seem to serve the similar purpose as 
Debian [GNU]/Linux's larger netinst "Small CDs or USB sticks" described 
near the top-left of [11], and the former _easily_ fit onto a 210 MiB 
mini-CD.

That being said above, since a "Network connection is required" to get 
started using Alpine Linux Standard as per [13], this required network 
connection is most likely via wired/Ethernet and _not_ via wireless -- IMO 
most likely due to all the extra drivers that using wireless adapters and 
their cumulative diskspace requirements likely entail. Which I think would 
then align with what Bobbie S wrote near the bottom of [14] regarding 
driver and other updates for using SliTaz Linux 5 in particular, here:

Quoting Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com>:
> And Slitaz 5 works on i5/i7 machines if you really want to cut
> down on the size of your distribution.  I did not manage to
> get it online on WiFi though.  Maybe it needed an update but
> that will take a wired connecton I believe.

>From the description of Tiny Core Linux's various installation images in 
[15], I gather that all the extra included wireless drivers are what have 
_also_ brought the size of the current CorePlus image well past 106 MB and 
all the way past the size of what can fit onto a 210 MiB mini-CD, as one 
can directly observe in [16].


-A


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References
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[01]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q1/013847.html
[02]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_CD
[03]https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html
[04]http://www.slitaz.org/en/about/
[05]http://www.tinycorelinux.net/
[06]http://puppylinux.com/
[07]http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/puppy-slacko-5.7/
[08]https://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/
[09]https://www.supergrubdisk.org/category/download/supergrub2diskdownload/super-grub2-disk-stable/
[10]https://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/#stable
[11]https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst
[12]https://alpinelinux.org/about/
[13]https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/
[14]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q1/013854.html
[15]http://www.tinycorelinux.net/downloads.html
[16]http://www.tinycorelinux.net/10.x/x86/release/
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aaronco36 at sdf.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org