Re: [gentoo-user] [Offtopic] Lightweight server distro for an old motherboard

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2012 11:41:54 +0800
Andrew Lowe <agl@×××××××.au> wrote:

> On 08/29/12 11:35, Michael Mol wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 10:57 PM, Andrew Lowe <agl@×××××××.au>
> > wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>          Anyone got any suggestions for a lightweight server
> >> distro for an old motherboard? I've got one of the VIA mini-ITX
> >> boards, SP13000, and want to whack something light onto it. It
> >> will be working as a file/media server and will be headless, hence
> >> will be fiddled via ssh. Obviously there are the usual suspects,
> >> debian, centos, but does anyone have any recommendations viv a vis
> >> a stripped down distro, sort of like Lubuntu is to Ubuntu?
> >>
> >>          Any thoughts greatly appreciated,
> >
> > Cripes, you're asking in gentoo-user. Of course someone's going to
> > suggest Gentoo.
> >
> > Let it be me...and I'll explain:
> >
> > 1) You can put something like -Os or -O2 in your CFLAGS, whichever
> > helps your performance case better.
> > 2) You can target your CFLAGS to your exact processor, allowing
> > generated machine code to be as efficient as possible on your CPU
> > (which you'll need, if it's a low-power CPU!)
> > 3) You don't have to compile on the mini-ITX board; you can
> > cross-compile and use binpkgs to install.
> > 4) You can use USE flags to strip out (virtually) any and every
> > feature you don't use, reducing both your code size, load and
> > execution time.
> >
> > If you want to do something lightweight, there's not much better you
> > can do than with Gentoo.
> >
>
> 	It had Gentoo on it for ages, and has not been updated in
> ages. It takes "years" to do anything, with respect to compiling so
> I'm just looking for a simple "point and click", binary download type
> of thingy to keep it going. I've been down the cross compile route
> also - once bitten twice shy and I don't care how many strides the
> dev's have made in recent years, I'm not trying again on principle.

There's also DamnSmallLinux but if you ask me that's going too far to
the other extreme. Yeah, it fits inside 50M but cripes, it has to use
weird package management to do it.

If not FreeBSD, then something Arch-based is probably your best step 1. 
Arch is a bit like *buntu in many ways, once you've decided to go that
route, there's not really much difference between all the variants.
It's not the base that's resource heavy, it's KDE and Gnome.




-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com