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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting aaronco36 (aaronco36 at SDF.ORG):

> 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.

Nope.  Spot-on.  The smallest images are the 'netinst' ones.  I have:

Liten-Datamaskin:isos rick$ ls -lh *.iso | grep netinst | grep debian | awk '{ print $5 "  " $9 }'
326M  debian-unofficial-with-nonfree-firmware-9.7.0-amd64-netinst.iso
413M  debian-unofficial-with-nonfree-firmware-9.7.0-i386-netinst.iso
Liten-Datamaskin:isos rick$

Those are the unofficial images with, as it says on the tin, an
extensive collection of non-free firmware files added in -- so a bit
larger than the official ones.  Official Debian's 9.8 netinst ISOs
appear to be:

292M  debian-9.8.0-amd64-netinst.iso 
378M  debian-9.8.0-i386-netinst.iso  

...as seen on
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/i386/iso-cd/
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso-cd/

(A netinst image contains just the minimal amount of software to start
the installation and fetch the remaining packages over the Internet from
the package repos.  It's highly efficient and fast if you have
broadband; you fetch only what you say to install, getting the current
versions immediately.)

> 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??

Reference at link #11 was to https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst, the
netinst images -- so no.  I like the netinst images a lot, and they're
pretty darned small, but are no longer 290MB small.  Though, I must say,
look like the 64-bit one w/o non-free firmware missed by just a smadge, nei?

> (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].


Sure.  _That_ is svelte.  And well-respected.  It's kind-of targeted
as a firewall/router distribution, FWIW, not that it'd be perverse to 
use it for, say, a full-blown server or for embedded systems.  Or
desktop even, I guess, though it's not a use-case that's likely to be
wildly popular.


> 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. 

Doing some reading (http://lists.alpinelinux.org/alpine-devel/6008.html), 
looks like the official Alpine Linux ISOs don't include a cache of
non-free firmware packages, as they wanted the ISOs to be free/libre
software -- but they have no problem with someone doing a respin to add
such in.


> 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:

[snip]

Maybe it's just me, but this all seems like a whole lot of difficulty to
go through, when you could instead put any ISO you like onto a USB flash
disk and, if you want, unpack any additional non-free firmware files
you desire into it, to use as needed during installation.

I haven't seen even i386 boxen in long years that cannot boot from USB, 
and suspect any that cannot are _hopelessly_ ancient, but one could
takes care of that bizarre edge-case by putting Plop Boot Manager on,
just for giggles, a floppy disk, for purposes of side-booting over to
USB.

i386 boxen that don't even have USB at all?  Feh.  I'm thinking of the
Wiley cartoon on the 1st edition of Cheskwick and Bellovin's firewall
book:  'Must be this tall to storm castle.'
http://wilyhacker.com/1e/cover.jpg
http://wilyhacker.com/1e/