NewsForge: The little Linux distribution that could: tomsrtbt

[ Thanks to Sleepy for this link. ]

"Now, I can hear some people ask, "What can a Linux distribution that fits on a single floppy disk do for me?" The answer is "plenty." You won't want to run your enterprise on this particular distribution, but it might very well bail out your enterprise from time to time. Tomsrtbt can be an important tool in your toolkit.

Those of us who have been around long enough to remember MS-DOS boot floppies may be skeptical at first. After all, a single DOS floppy was lucky if it could format disks and read files from a CD-ROM. It was sorely restricted in its utility. You were lucky to get 20 usable commands, and real networking was almost always out of the question.

Not so with tomsrtbt. Currently using Linux kernel 2.0.36, Tom's manages to cram some 200 modules and utilities onto a single floppy. These range from the programs needed to mount and format disks, to support for some PCMCIA devices. There are even pint-sized versions of vi and EMACS, so that almost no one's editor religion will be offended."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• O'Reilly Network: System Failure and Recovery Practice(Dec 06, 2001)
• LinuxLookup.com: Mtools - It's all about floppies...(Oct 08, 2000)
• Linux Journal: Getting Small with Linux, Part 1(Apr 01, 2000)
• Ext2: A Look at Tomsrtbt(Dec 22, 1999)