Minimal Linux

Sometimes I want to send somebody a demo appliance with a minimalistic Linux system, so he can test a software or so. With nowadays Linux distributions this is impossible as they are unbelievably big. Goal is to get to something far smaller than 10M so it can pass mail servers.

MiniLinux is a small GNU makefile which fetches Linux kernel, busybox, uClibc, syslinux, acpid and builds a minimalistic Linux on a Qemu virtual disk (also VMWare or VirtualBox is possible).

Build the image with:

make source
make qemu

The image is started with:

qemu -hda minilinux.img

download sources
download a QEMU image
view demo session

A Git repository is accessible at git://git.andreasbaumann.cc/minilinux.git (or at http://git.andreasbaumann.cc/cgit/minilinux/)

In case of questions, contact me via email.