# 5 Tiny Distros you have to try before you die by Seth Kenlon There are plenty of Linux distributions out there for you to choose from when deciding what you're going to run on a daily basis, but some are so small that they tend to go unnoticed. But tiny Linux distributions are powerful innovations: an entire operating system driving a computer on less than 1 GB hard drive space and half as much RAM is the ultimate software hack. It has many uses, including: * Saves old and slow computers from the rubbish bin. Reject planned obsolescence and use computers until they fall apart, not just when they start to feel slow. * Boot broken or corrupted systems from a thumbdrive so you can recover data or repair boot partitions. * Ensure a safe and private environment when on a public computer. Boot a public computer in a hotel lobby or a library from a thumbdrive so that you know your operating environment is secure. There are plenty of lightweight distributions out there, like [Lubuntu](http://lubuntu.net), [Peppermint OS](http://peppermintos.com), and [Bodhi](https://www.bodhilinux.com/), but there's something special about the truly tiny. Here are five tiny distros you owe it to yourself to try. ## Tiny Core Linux  At 11 MX for a text console and 16 MB for a GUI, Tiny Core is almost impossibly small. I dug through my collection of old thumbdrives and the smalles one was 128 MB, which is still 8 times the size of the Tiny Core image. By default, Tiny Core includes the base OS, assuming that you have an ethernet connection to the internet so you can install only the applications you need. It's such an extremely efficient model that it doesn't even include an application to install the OS (although you can download it from the Tiny Core repository when you're ready to install). I've run Tiny Core from a 128 MB thumbdrive on a system with 512 MB RAM, and the performance was, as you might expect from an OS that only takes 16 MB, excellent. Performance slows only when browsing the Internet in a web browser, but you can blame the complexity of most modern websites for that more than you can blame Tiny Core. ### Installation Download Tiny Core from [tinycorelinux.net](http://tinycorelinux.net/welcome.html) and write it to a thumbdrive with ``dd`` or [Etcher](https://www.balena.io/etcher/). Installing Tiny Core is easy, once you download the ``tc-install`` or ``tc-install-GUI`` application using the **Apps** icon in the launcher bar at the bottom of the screen.  You have several options for how you want to install. You can install Tiny Core to a thumbdrive formatted as a Linux drive (this requires your computer to allow booting from a USB drive, which is common in most modern PCs but was less common for older ones), a Microsoft FAT thumbdrive (a hack for PCs that don't normally boot from USB drives), or even to a directory in an existing Linux partition. The installation is quick, and when you're done, you can reboot your computer and boot into your Tiny Core Linux OS. ### Applications Since it comes with little more than a text editor and a terminal, the first thing you should do is install some applications. The **Apps** icon in the bottom launcher bar displays all the Tiny Core packages available to you. The **Apps** repository doesn't contain only applications, but includes important drivers as well, so it's useful when you're looking to get a wifi card or a printer working. When installing a new application or utility, you can choose between having the package load into Tiny Core at boot time or on demand. Choosing to load a package at boot results in just what you'd expect when installing an application: it's available to you immediately, and is still available after a reboot. Choosing to load it on-demand means that Tiny Core downloads the package and makes it available to you now, but after a reboot it won't be loaded into memory. This potentially keeps your boot time fast and Tiny Core's footprint in RAM tiny, but it means the package data hasn't actually been loaded into memory until you use it for the first time each session. The application selection is a good mix between user-centric apps, like office and graphics applications, and server-centric, such as SAMBA and web servers. Of course, once you start adding applications to Tiny Core, it becomes less tiny. Even the **Tiny Core Plus** image, which includes all wifi drivers, from the Tiny Core website, is only about 100 MB, so "less tiny" is very likely still well under 256 MB or so. ### Bottom line Tiny Core is ideal for old computers with few resources, network boot images, and anyone who values applications over the OS. Tiny Core is a great weekend project: build the OS you want from 16 MB up until you have the only as much of an OS as you need. ## SliTaz ### Installation ### Applications ### Bottom line