Talk:MiniSUSE

From openSUSE

Here you can give ideas and opinions what to include on main page of MiniSUSE project.

For discussion about project itself, visit MiniSUSE Project Discussion page.

The discussion below took place before function of separate Project Discussion page was clearly defined. It was my mistake too name it only MiniSUSE Discussion, what Pflodo corrected in, for me, unexpected way, pointing out confusion produced with missing word Project. To prevent further missunderstandings I'll leave to him decision to move it back, or not. --Rajko M

MiniSUSE has a moving target. It is defined by hardware properties and today is minimal, tomorrow will be micro and then disappears from horizon. Any plan must be possible to execute in short term, to be a viable, it must be a mini, like original idea to convince Installer to work with lesser memory.

--Rajko M 23:59, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

It is a mistake to see this project as only applicable to old machines. If successful, I can see that miniSUSE would be a great starting point for creating other special installations. Want to build a SUSE based MythTV, start with miniSUSE and add only packages required for MythTV and drivers. This might still be running on the latest CPU and huge amounts of memory.

--Pflodo 01:23, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Right.

Let we take one step at the time. Let we make Installer run on any 586 hardware. If successful that will open the door for more users to join. Than we can start next step, making small usefull text system, with more users able to use (test) miscellaneous installations, give comments, report problems, etc. Jdd repeated a lot of times that for many users 586 is still the only choice. Give them a chance to show what they can and all will benefit from that.

--Rajko M 14:00, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I think there should be a minimum memory requirement. I have 10 systems with 8-32 MB memory. I do not think it is reasonable to install a version of SUSE Linux on them. There are other version os linux best suited for them. I thin a minimul requirement of 64 MB is a good lower lime. I have many more of these systems. I use them to test many different things, I would like a version of SUSE with Live DVD that is installable. All these systems have CDROM's or DVDROM's

--User:gerberb 18:00, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

I used mini system to do a special work like routing and caching. I hope this miniSUSE is a good replacement for m0n0wall. I don't care about GUI, as long as it detects my peripheral perfectly. Currently, poor man like me use old PC as router rather than buy a cisco router. Thanks.

Where do download?

I have searched and searched and can't find any downloads for miniSUSE. Does anybody know of a server I don't? --Felipe1982 20:26, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi Fellipe,

Sorry to disappoint you, but project was never intended to be a fork of openSUSE, with own CD. Few collected articles that give advice how to install openSUSE on underpowered machines is for now all.

The openSUSE made serious effort to boot faster, to ask for lesser resources, to make distribution very scalable, and that was all what MiniSUSE was about. Distribution is now in way better shape than it was in version 9.3 considering MiniSUSE goals and as I can see they didn't stopped. --Rajko M 00:35, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Just come across this page and it interests towards what I want to form.

My idea is to have one totally self contained desktop (like the diskless workstation model but in a usb pod) and the backoffice components on a full blown system with transparent interworking.

I was looking at using puppy linux (puppy.org) as a desktop version amd openSuSE as the backoffice "bit" but would prefer the one source for both.

Puppy has a few problems (5 loop limit) and directions not of my liking (such as the way they handle added applications), but it's overall idea is i think what MiniSuSE should be aiming for.

I shall keep an eye on this.

Hi, after going through this MiniSUSE Project, I realised that it is not a specific distribution but just a discussion. However, I don't seem to be able to find much information on how to install a minimal and lite version of SuSE for my use. My situation is that we have quite a number of Pentium II, 450MHz with 64MB RAM and 4GB HDD sitting around. I have an empty lab which I intended to place 40 of these into and run Linux. The main purpose of the lab is for web browsing. Other usage of the lab is to teach shell scripting, basic kernel reconfiguration and development and socket programming. For the latter, I have installed Debian in text based mode and it works fine BUT I really would like to have a GUI interface but basically just for web browsing.

I would like to suggest that the SUSE/openSuSE installation has an option for small memory footprint installation with basic tools like maybe just ephinany, abiword and GNU C/C++. If this is already available, can someone tell me how. (Of course, i can get other distributions like PuppyLinux but somehow if there are similarities with SuSE, that would be my ideal situation).

Other than that, I wonder if SuSE has a Terminal Server edition, where I can put a powerful server for it and use the 40 PCs as terminals.

The philosophy behind SUSE is to offer all in one media with so called patterns that allow easy installation of software groups that fulfill certain task. The terminal server is LTSP, but in the moment, so far I understand, it is in development. It is already present in distribution, but the goal of development is easy installation. Also there is KIWI which should support creation of custom distributions. There is also project Education that is pushing LTSP and KIWI as both can be big help to people like you, that are trying to use older machines in education.

I'm about to start learning KIWI as that fits my long term goal to create small memory footprint software selection. Now with Education project picking up I have new motivation to put more effort in this, as that will serve quite much bigger number of people. The 64 MB looks like almost impossible task, but the whole Linux, from first kernel, was and is about impossible tasks, that eventually don't look that way. --Rajko M 00:25, 14 July 2007 (UTC)