I'm looking to install an extremely light-weight flavour of linux on a USB stick. It also needs to be basically only CLI. Has anyone ever looked for something like this? Ever found something good?
16 Answers
To be particularly minimal, you could roll your own. Fair warning: this is an endeavor of many hours, but you'll better appreciate what goes into getting your OS pieced together.
Linux From Scratch is a very actively maintained step-by-step guide on just that:
1Red Hat or Debian are probably what your looking for. You could also install Ubuntu as command line only.
2MicroCore is a command-line only variant of Tiny Core Linux.
1ttylinux is extremely lightweight and CLI only -- busybox utilities built off of uclib.
1Back in the day there was Linux On A Floppy (LOAF) and Tom's Root Boot. However I suspect they are too super light weight for USB drives :-)
Nowadays I suppose the equivalent is Damn Small Linux which will install onto a bootable USB flash stick.
Ubuntu Server might be what you are looking for. Because servers are usually headless, the basic setup does not contain any GUI parts.
