Linux

[Scuba_Steve]

What's the lightest flavor you know of??? I'm not talking smallest, I mean lightest (smallest CPU & RAM footprint), as I want to leave as much computing power free for actual computing as possible.
All the OS has to do is run LAMP & stream video through it (it's this video streaming I want the computing power for as there'll be multiple streams)

The other option has anyone built linux from scratch or tried the SUSE Studio (which seems like a simple easy way to "custom build" but does appear to have some build limitations), just interested in peoples experience with this/these routes

[nathanwhite]

Try puppy Linux or DamnSmallLinux, both blazingly fast on my laptop which is slow enough to not be able to run ubuntu properly.

[SMOKEU]

Damn Small Linux works fine on a VM with 64MB of RAM. I don't like the GUI on it though, and the man pages aren't anywhere near as nice as the other distros.

[CookMySock]

See also U-lite. Looks just like Ubuntu.

[Scuba_Steve]

GUI looks ain't an issue here (this coming from a mac user who likes his pretty icons ), preferably I'd omit the GUI thus the overhead that comes with it & stick to the CLI for this build

[Akzle]

oooooooh. now this sounds fun.
depending on your l33t skillz, a freshy build could be the go.

BUT it may be easier to unbuild... IE install buntu/fedora (fedora uses similar base to redhat which is the go-to fast server distro) then strip out the sh*t you don't need. of course, if you're running the CLI then there's heaps less draw anyway. and you sound some kind of clever so you shouldn't have too much trouble removing stuff. (try getting pulse* out of 'buntu for fun....)

i would reccomend debian (predecessor to buntu) or fedora (as above) as that's what i know/have exp with. debian you can basically build your install before you install. and of course there's apt once you have installed. and they have massive (MASSIVE) dev repositories.

((edit)) to further answer your Q - i have no experience with SUSE studio, but the big buttoned user friendlyness of their front page puts me right off.
for a lightweight GUI go xfce (i believe it's on UBCD with some network diag tools...)

((edit-edit))mandrake if you can get it, mandriva if you can't (fedora based but may offer advantages)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._distributions

[Scuba_Steve]

((edit)) to further answer your Q - i have no experience with SUSE studio, but the big buttoned user friendlyness of their front page puts me right off.
for a lightweight GUI go xfce (i believe it's on UBCD with some network diag tools...)

((edit-edit))mandrake if you can get it, mandriva if you can't (fedora based but may offer advantages)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._distributions

I've found xfce getting to bloated, I'm currently running a LXDE Debian install

I remember good old Mandrake, that was the 1st linux flavor I ran with, sorta started losing interest once it became Mandriva tho

Might have to find an old copy of Mandrake, that was light enough to run on my PII 200Mhz w/ 32Mb RAM with no problem at all

[Akzle]

I've found xfce getting to bloated, I'm currently running a LXDE Debian install

I remember good old Mandrake, that was the 1st linux flavor I ran with, sorta started losing interest once it became Mandriva tho

Might have to find an old copy of Mandrake, that was light enough to run on my PII 200Mhz w/ 32Mb RAM with no problem at all

you can "unbloat" any DE. i haven't done extensive testing with xfce, just installed it on buntu to have a looksee, along with every other they were offering at the time (~8) didn't end up using it much. KDE was poo, but probably appeal to mac users (it's really hard to break anything) so i went back to a fairly stock gnome.

i rocked out with ~redhat2.0 at the recomendation of my brother who was at that time an IT-god, upped to mandrake ~Y2K, when they stopped making red hat and started producing mandriva (even the name makes me gag) which looked to be trying as a fedora clone with the red hat backend = what's the point.

torrents would be the go. there innt much you can't find in the land of .tor else i may be able to dig one out of my CD-graveyard.

i daresay you could strip down your current system to meet your specs tho, and if you're already familiar with debian sticking with that will make troubleshooting a lot easier.

[Buyasta]

Admittedly I'm a little biased as it's already my favourite distro, but as long as you know what you're doing, Arch sounds perfect for your needs.
It's a completely minimal install, out of the box it pretty much just consists of a kernel, bash, busybox and pacman, its package management system, so there's no need to do any stripping, it comes minimal. Also when you install new packages, it won't install every possible potential dependency like many distros, it'll just advise you of it's optional dependencies that will enable additional features, which lends itself well to a minimal system.

As I said, it's already my favoured distro as I love minimal distros with a rolling release system that don't try to hold your hand, just provide you with a shell and let you get on with it; but it is pretty much perfect for server installs in my view, with the caveat that you must know what you're doing - it won't provide a default config file setup so most people can just install and run, never bothering with configuration, it just provides the upstream defaults and leaves you to tune everything to your particular needs.

[SMOKEU]

I installed Lubuntu 12.04 on a Pentium 4 computer with 512MB RAM. It uses around 80MB of RAM to idle, and it doesn't sacrifice much compared to Ubuntu or Mint. I use it as my daily OS.

[Brian d marge]

See old Torvalds , giving the finger to Nvidia today

Stephen

I like puppys