Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[bark_bark_bark]

What is Tiny Puppy?

As of now, it's a concept.

So what is the point of such a thread?

To hopefully get code for woof to produce such a puplet.

What have you done so far?

Modified/Created some code in to woof-distro directory.

[puppyluvr]

Hello,
Did a TCPup a few years back, and it ended up being huge.. TC packages are static, meaning containing all the deps, not sharing..
But basically, edit "distro package specs" and "distro compat repos" to point to Tinycore..
Put them in woof2/woof-distro/x86/
Edit "distro specs" and give it a shot..

[sunburnt]

Tiny Core is interesting and very small as it comes with almost nothing.
But using massive amounts of links and many separate packages is nuts!

Puppy is simpler, it has 1 to 2 Squash files for it`s most common apps.
A happy medium between Tiny Core and Puppy would be a good setup.

The main difference is that Tiny Core doesn`t use a union. That`s good.
But using thousands of links to fudge for a union is a brute force method.

I like TC`s minimal base O.S., just what`s needed so it`s a useful O.S.
All addon apps. should be "attached" to the O.S. and easily removable.

Puppy`s Devx Squash file`s a good idea, so extra library Sq. files too.
This keeps the app. packages small because of shared libs. in Sq. files.

Basically the O.S. would be about 3 to 6 Sq. files plus the app. Sq. files.
Save area can be an image file (ntfs), a partition (ext3-4), or best a dir.

A small initrd.gz file with only code and files to mount the main Sq. file.
Main Sq. file`s inside the initrd.gz file, so it`s loaded into ram.
Only 2 files make up the base O.S., vmlinuz and initrd.gz with base Sq.
The base Sq. file and the initrd.gz would hardly ever need modifying.

Tiny Core is easy to work with as it doesn`t have all of Puppy`s code.
And it`s base is stripped down making it an "add-on apps." type of O.S.

[Iguleder]

Before doing some infrastructure changes, we should look at our ways of doing things.

Slacko is full of crap, many unneeded libraries (for example, all the libgnome* ones) and deprecated packages (e.g autologin - mingetty replaces it).

Much of this crap comes from Woof, which introduces the dependency on installwatch, truncate (makes me angry every time I see it - why, why?! /bin/head is good enough), bbc_provided, nenscript and so much more. Lots of overhead, for no good reason.

[nancy reagan]

[Iguleder]

The situation here is very very bad, rockets fall in a radius of 5 km from my house, once in a few hours at day and about twice a hour at night. I can hear fighter jets and heavy helicopters, flying to bomb the terrorists in Gaza.

I was in the streets of Tel Aviv when it was threatened by the first rocket in central Israel since the Gulf War. It was scary.

But ... let's get back to the topic.

I think Puppy can be shrinked by about 10 MB, by removing unneeded packages. By calling them "crap", I meant they're unneeded. I remember I did an experiment with Lupu when it was young - I was able to shave about 20 MB of its size by removing unneeded libraries.

That's only the first step. The second thing that has to be done is improved package quality control, by establishing a build server, which automatically builds packages and ensures they don't have unneeded stuff.

Regarding the devx - it's a lie. Telling users Puppy is 100 MB without the devx is true, but many of them need it, for crucial things like Python. Also, I think the static libraries in the devx will compress well, if all the devx is part of the ISO, because of the shared libraries in the main SFS. Maybe, overall, the devx only adds up to size.

[nancy reagan]

[bark_bark_bark]

I decided to rename it to Tpup.

I am wondering what packages non-GUI system packages I need, and which PET repo do they come from. I need this so then there is nothing missing. I think the Xorg package I'll get from TinyCore (at first).

What's next for the pkg selection?