MiniOS – a lightweight Linux distribution designed for USB drive

Although most distros should work out of the box these days (I think?) nothing beats these smaller ones for interested people and especially “younglings” to try out; “running from a stick”.<p>My first contact with Linux&#x2F;Unix was through fli4l [1] an open source boot-from-floppy Linux router with which I shared our family’s intermittent 56k dial-up (!) links back in the day (I believe from 2000 onwards it was a single channel ISDN line; what a dream).<p>Then there was the famous Knoppix [2] distro; coming with many German computer magazines at least.<p>So yeah, all in all I’m more of a *BSD “graduate” (main reason being man pages were usually of higher quality; at the time at least) but to this day my favourite flash’n boot distro is still Debian based “headless CLI first” GRML Linux [3] (came with pre-configured zsh way before it was cool, lots of networking tools etc, a Swiss Army knife for the sysadmin).<p>I had been running an old underclocked PC with it as a router and for NFS - for years and only until somewhat recently.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fli4l.de" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fli4l.de</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;knoppix.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;knoppix.net&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grml.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grml.org&#x2F;</a>

I love this. I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a year or two (Netbook, load to RAM, save changes to USB). It was the most comfortable I ever felt using a computer. I used my laptop&#x27;s HD as a pure data drive for large files only.<p>Puppy encrypted the entire OS on USB. So it would boot fine but needed to be decrypted during the boot process.<p>It contained all my apps, system settings and smaller files (docs, html, passwords, personal docs, etc) that I decided to save in the encrypted OS&#x2F;USB.<p>The laptop&#x27;s mounted HD contained the larger stuff... tons of videos, pics, etc.. basically all the stuff I didn&#x27;t really need to protect&#x2F;encrypt.<p>Someone could steal the laptop and I wouldn&#x27;t care (all that large stuff is always backed up too on externals). Someone could steal the USB and they&#x27;d have to know it was a bootable, encrypted USB. Even so, they&#x27;d also need to know how to decrypt on boot. I felt so safe even when traveling.<p>I could also plug my USB into any laptop and BOOM! ready to go:-) It was like a plug-n-play super-power.<p>I saw MiniOS listed here and I immediately thought of my old Puppy setup. Looking forward to giving this OS a spin. I hope it considers my use case in their thinking (though I&#x27;m sure I can tweak it easily to fulfill my needs).

This is one of those sites that hijacks your scrolling, which I wish there was a standard for &quot;please just let me scroll freely&quot;. It&#x27;s not super awful but its kind of annoying, I like to read things on either the top or bottom edge of my browser window so I dont lose my spot.

You can also make your own USB drive mini-distro, atop Debian.<p>With LilDeb, I made a layer atop Debian Live, including an optional mutable partition, and curated a package mix and configs for it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;lildeb&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;lildeb&#x2F;</a>

What I would like to see is a brief discussion of why one should use MiniOS instead of, say Puppy, Slitaz, Tiny Core, etc. I might try it out anyway.

I’m probably going to make some Linux desktop guys mad, but the page says “Attention to detail” and then proceeds to show very many desktop window screenshots where the styles are very inconsistent. Font sizes, margins around elements, menu bar styles, title bar styles and naming conventions, one of the windows has an application icon in the title, but only one, the icon sizes are very different. What’s the point of saying “attention to detail” and then showing this?

Reminds me of DSL - Damn Small Linux. Only those were the days of running on a floppy.

I remember running Linux on a floppy disk back in the 90s. Used it as a NAT between the school network and my computer(s) in my room.<p>Pretty cool to see the functionality increase with portability. Although, floppy disk space is significantly less than a USB drive.

Came for the interesting headline on HN, left after 10 seconds because of the horrible unusable webpage.

Who is going to use a distro from a Web site with a yandex.ru tracker?

If I was traveling a lot it could be useful to have a Linux on USB always with me.<p>But then I&#x27;d also like to have a backup solution<p>Let&#x27;s assume this would become your main OS. It would need to run on any hardware, that means support for l the archs, or at least x86 and arm (in the broadest sense). And it would need lightweight (in the actual sense) backups. I&#x27;m thinking about a backup station where you insert you main OS stick before you go to bed. It would have 2 drives, in case 1 fails. And an ethernet port (or wifi additionally) for external backups.<p>So you insert it, go to bed and when you wake up you have internal and external backups.<p>But I think that there aren&#x27;t too many people interested in having their main OS on a USB drive.<p>One might have to provide a cpu&#x2F;ram&#x2F;drive bay along with it. And there would need to be a simple drive swapping process and low cost case replacement option. USB should not bottleneck the data transfer rates.<p>So I searched and of course something similar already exists. But not the way I envisioned it. A USB 3.2 to m.2 adapter, with its own power supply, and a sata 3 port where you can plug in a drive to create or restore backups. No ethernet port or network connectivity.<p>My vision is a case, a station, that does incremental backups to 2 slot inserted drives and optionally to (configurable) remote targets in sequence.<p>The USB port would need to be high quality.<p>Would I support SATA? No, maybe. Initially only m.2 connectors.

For projects like this the first thing I like to look at is a ChangeLog. That gives you a sense of the momentum.<p>If you click on the &quot;News&quot; menu item, you need to have Telegram app installed. :(

I don&#x27;t consider this very mini. Not when compared with the likes of slitaz, puppy, or Tiny Core. Or how this would be better that usb specific distros like porteus and slax.

Just last week I was talking about running linux from a tiny usb drive and trying that as an escape from Windows 11.<p>My thinking was that rather than lugging a laptop back and forth from work to home, I would just have a computer at each, and just bring my USB key with.<p>My co-workers said everything would feel slow, but with 500mb&#x2F;s usb thumb drives with 512gb, I think it should be fine.<p>I just might try MiniOS.

Apart from being a rescue os, what are some common usecases where it helps ?<p>One, you can have your data&#x2F;software literally in your pocket assuming that&#x27;s the threat model you are dealing with.<p>The other scenarios I could think of involve too much friction to stick with it for long term.

And no one notices the name clash with Xen&#x27;s mini-os [1]. We&#x27;ve come a long way since Xen and the Art of Virtualization [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.xenproject.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mini-OS" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.xenproject.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mini-OS</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cl.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;research&#x2F;srg&#x2F;netos&#x2F;papers&#x2F;2003-xensosp.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cl.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;research&#x2F;srg&#x2F;netos&#x2F;papers&#x2F;2003-xens...</a>

with usb at about 256gb - 1tb now. Looking forward to a world were everyone carries their computer in a usb.

Hah! Nice. I tried to do this a while ago with MX Linux. Biggest thing IIRC was to disable swap and tune disk&#x2F;buffer write sync thresholds, both so you&#x27;re not burning too many write cycles and also so applications can get away with writing to &quot;disk&quot; without stuttering on IO across slow USB ports.<p>The usefulness day-to-day is pretty limited, however, assuming you&#x27;re just carrying it around and also have access to proper installations.

I wonder if I could put this on an old peppy chromebook. 1660MB max sounds great.<p>What am I missing out on?<p>I currently have xubuntu 22.04 installed on it an constantly struggling to free up space for upgrades.<p>Or what could I remove from it to free up space?

Does it come with sources and can it compile&#x2F;produce a new distribution of itself? So I could modify the sources just a little bit and get a new version by executing a command like &#x27;make&#x27; etc. ?

Just yesterday I flashed a USB drive with Puppy Linux and modified it to start Emacs on boot so that I would have my editor wherever I go. Looking forward to trying this distro!

There is a spelling typo on the front page:<p>&quot;The system-constructor, in its basic version, is an analogue of the &gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;Stantard&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt; version&quot;

I had tried Finnix.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Finnix" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Finnix</a>

Reminds me of the days I used to carry a ton of live ISOs on me all the time.<p>SliTaz might have been my favorite. TIL initial release was 2008.

Reminds me of Slackware Live AKA SLAX and my days carrying a mini-CD with it wherever I went. Beautiful times.

Today I realised Mandriva is no longer around, once upon a time Mandrake was my favourite distro.

In their home page they state: &quot;We make MiniOS beautiful so that you can enjoy using it every day and for any task. We pay great attention to every detail in the operating system&quot;, and there are mentions to Mandriva, Debian, even Fluxbox, nowhere Xfce is mentioned, it&#x27;s almost like they are implying the aforementioned qualities are their merit alone.

lightweight OS needs a lightweight website. It needs to work without JS.<p>What in the world about the first page was so essential that it needed a JS version?

took me a second to figure out if it was min iOS or mini OS