Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

Day Off · 2009-10-01 00:29:00

Hi everyone!

This felt like the right place to drop in a question or two about using this distribution as embedded OS.

What I'm now looking into, as a personal project, is purchasing an ITX motherboard along with SSD disk and installing a Linux on it.

Problem with run of the mill Linux distributions is that they're intented mostly for desktop users and require hidious amounts of disk space for all the utterly useless bloat for this purpose of mine. This distribution caught my eye as potentially clean and spartan base installation.

I would like to know what are the usual installation foot prints without X Server and what is the absolute minimum foot print (no compilers even, minimal system tools and so on)?

Disk sizes start from 128MB and progress logically from there on, so even approximate answer (128MB, 256MB, 512MB .... ) is useful.

What would be the minimum partition scheme I could get away with? Root and swap?

Thank You very much in advance for your attention and help.

Last edited by Day Off (2009-10-01 08:36:20)

arkham · 2009-10-01 00:34:03

Hello, in my personal experience, while very nice and fun to use, Arch is not really space-conserving. I'd suggest you to look at distros like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux

Day Off · 2009-10-01 00:56:59

arkham wrote:

Hello, in my personal experience, while very nice and fun to use, Arch is not really space-conserving. I'd suggest you to look at distros like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux

Hey!

Thank's for the suggestion. I gave them both another look, but they both look like GUI orientated distributions. Poking around their pages didn't give me any confirmation that I could install neither without a GUI and retain distribution functionalities (ie. pacman and friends in Arch distribution). Do you know if that would be possible?

I may have been little brief in my description, and it might be useful to add that I am planning on dropping the forementioned ITX board into a radiocontrolled boat (little larger than a "usual") and put it to work in monitoring power systems, environmental conditions and I will attempt to make it relay a webcam stream over WLAN (in short ranges, ofcourse). Hence I want absolute minimum in the installation, and definately no graphical user interface. It will basicly read stuff from few sources and shovel processed packets out to the network, that's about it.

I haven't used Linux for many many years now (Slackware 2.0 was da bomb back then), and without the webcam idea I would still be doing all the other stuff with microcontrollers - that's why I'm more than little out of touch with all these distributions and stuff I now see that there's such a thing as Embedded Slackware as well. Will give that a look too.

Cheers!

LeoSolaris · 2009-10-01 01:10:20

Best I can say is "It depends." ™

On a chip of 256 MB you could likely get away with having everything on one partition, and no swap space. (Test it first, then test it with a tiny swap) On a 512, you should be fine with even using the auto-installer, since it only makes a 256 MB root.

You will have to literally strip out everything you don't need for the function of this device. (Usually embedded PC's are one trick ponies that focus on a single task). Just remember to not remove pacman until you are finished installing everything. I would make two copies, one with pacman, and one without. The one with pacman would be sort of the dev version, while the one without is harder to change, thus meant for end users.

Another Distro to consider is Crux. You can make an insanely tiny Crux system, and probably have less to strip out afterwards.

Crux Handbook wrote:

A minimum of 160MB system memory is required to install CRUX from CD-ROM. It is possible to perform a custom chroot installation with only 16MB of RAM.

Crux is a little sparser than Arch, and even more resource friendly, because they strip out all the junk files, like docs and readmes from their packages.

The main distro is i686, but they have an i586 linked from their handbook. (Which Arch does not have at all. Arch is purely i686 and nothing less.) Add to all of that the fact that Arch picks bleeding-edge packages, while Crux picks the latest stable release.

I use Crux for machines that are simply too little to run even Arch... which is saying something about their tininess.

Edit: typos are lethal...

Last edited by LeoSolaris (2009-10-01 01:26:26)

perbh · 2009-10-01 01:16:40

what about 'grml' ??
(it is my favourite toolbox/rescue distro - no 'X' - infact it is for "text-tool users" - quote and unquote)
It _is_ debian based, but no 'X'.

Day Off · 2009-10-01 08:34:34

LeoSolaris wrote:

On a chip of 256 MB you could likely get away with having everything on one partition, and no swap space. (Test it first, then test it with a tiny swap) On a 512, you should be fine with even using the auto-installer, since it only makes a 256 MB root.
...
Another Distro to consider is Crux. You can make an insanely tiny Crux system, and probably have less to strip out afterwards.
Crux is a little sparser than Arch, and even more resource friendly, because they strip out all the junk files, like docs and readmes from their packages.

Thank's!

That is very useful, and along with what arkham said, I will take up with your advice and put Archlinux down to the "reserve" pile.

I shall invest my time today heavily on getting to know Crux, grml and Embedded Slackware.

Thank You very much!

Day Off · 2009-10-01 08:36:02

perbh wrote:

what about 'grml' ??
(it is my favourite toolbox/rescue distro - no 'X' - infact it is for "text-tool users" - quote and unquote)
It _is_ debian based, but no 'X'.

Excellent, I will be getting familiar with this alternative as well as the third potential distribution.

Thank You very much!

steve___ · 2009-10-01 14:31:01

Hi Day Off,

Not to pick at your nits but I suggest renaming this post to 'Small Linux OS?'

"Embedded OS" generally means something which runs on custom hardware with a ARM, MIPS, etc. processor.

-steve

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-01 00:29:00

Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

#2 2009-10-01 00:34:03

Re: Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

#3 2009-10-01 00:56:59

Re: Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

#4 2009-10-01 01:10:20

Re: Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

#5 2009-10-01 01:16:40

Re: Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

#6 2009-10-01 08:34:34

Re: Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

#7 2009-10-01 08:36:02

Re: Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

#8 2009-10-01 14:31:01

Re: Arch as embedded OS? [SOLVED]

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