Opensourceinfo

DSL is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution. DSL has a nearly complete desktop, and many command line tools. All applications are chosen with functionality, size and speed in mind. Damn Small also has the ability to act as an SSH/FTP/HTTPD server right off of a live CD. In our quest to save space and have a fully functional desktop we've made many GUI administration tools which are fast yet still easy to use. Because all the applications are small and light it makes a very good choice for older hardware.

Currently there are 2 versions: a floppy and usb version. The floppy version is a so called rescue disk which is a compilation of uclibc and busybox among other utilities. It even has a ssh client provided by dropbear (congrats to the author) and some filesystem tools. For more info go to the download section. The USB version is more than just a rescue disk. It's based on Gentoo and contains various other programs/utilities such as network related tools (nmap, ettercap). For a full list go to the 'package list' section.

Puppy is extraordinarily small, yet quite fully featured. Puppy boots into a 48 - 54M ramdisk, and that's it, the whole caboodle runs in RAM. Unlike live CD distributions that have to keep pulling stuff off the CD, Puppy in his entirety loads into RAM. This means that most applications start in the blink of an eye and respond to user input instantly. Puppy can boot off different media: flash-Puppy (Puppy booting off a flash card or any USB memory device), live-Puppy (Puppy booting off a CDROM), zippy-Puppy (Puppy booting off a Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk), floppy-Puppy (Puppy booting off a set of floppy disks), hard-Puppy (Puppy booting off an internal hard drive).

RUNT (ResNet USB Network Tester) is Slackware Linux designed to run from a 256MB USB pen drive. It consists of a boot floppy image and a zip file, similar to "zipslack". It is intended to be a fairly complete Linux installation for use as a testing tool capable of booting on any x86 computer with a USB port and a bootable floppy drive. The boot floppy is based on Slackware's bare kernel. It contains an initial ramdisk to load USB-storage related modules and it pauses for 5 seconds to allow the drive to initialize. The bootdisk also contains Memtest86, a very useful RAM testing tool, which can be started by typing memtest at the boot prompt. The zip file contains a UMSDOS filesystem designed to be extracted onto a 128MB pen drive with an MSDOS filesystem using 2K clusters.

SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14") CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. The Live CD described here is based on the Slackware Linux distribution and uses Unification File System (also known as unionfs), allowing read-only filesystem to behave as a writable one, saving all changes to memory.

StressLinux is a minimal linux distribution running from a bootable cdrom or via PXE. stresslinux makes use of some utitlities available on the net like: stress, cpuburn, hddtemp, lm_sensors ... stresslinux is dedicated to users who want to test their system(s) entirely on high load and monitoring the health. You can boot stresslinux from an usb-stic or usb-floppy.