Thursday, May 12, 2016

Linux mirrors for ttylinux and RIPLinux

Hello
Without any doubt I'm a Debian user, I really like its stability for server and desktop machines. However, I found myself amused back in 2010 when I found out about ttylinux, a small ISO of about 100MB with ssh, http and firewall support.

ttylinux boot screen
ttylinux boot screen

With an small footprint, compatibility with older CPU and low memory support I became a occasional user of ttylinux to quickly boot it on bare metal from a CD-RW and say "Hey, this machine can run Linux". With the advent of virtualization I choose to boot ttylinux before anything else in order to check that my virtualization environment (VirtualBox, Xen, VMware or whatever else) was fully working or at least functional.

ttylinux login screen
ttylinux login screen

In the same year 2010 @RoadMr talked about RIPLinux and I quickly downloaded the ISO image, it was bigger, around 150 MB but it had many utilities and both a 32 and 64 bit kernels. The main purpose of the distribution was to rescue data, hence its name "(R)ecovery (I)s (P)ossible Linux"

RIPLinux boot screen
RIPLinux boot screen

I didn't used the X utilities much but I like the fact that you could perform rsync, sftp and even reset Windows passwords from the SAM hive, it even included the ntfs-3g which enables read-write support on NTFS filesystems. I found myself amused again and I added another CD-RW to my toolset.

RIPLinux login screen
RIPLinux login screen

It was terrible for me when I found out the last month that the ttylinux site was unreachable, I was trying to check two implementations I made, one with VirtualBox and another one with VMware. I quickly searched through the net and found various ISO images from current and past releases, the I found the ttylinux-mirror project on SourceForge and commited to download the 2.2 GB 7z archive.

Soon after I also realized about the RIPLinux website being unreachable too, this time I had no luck on finding a mirror archive until I found an exact copy on some Linux user group sites (thank you for mirroring :P). I downloaded the several copies and unified them on a single directory.

This exercise lead me to the idea of making my own mirror for both distros and perhaps working on them on my little free time, I set up the web server, bought the domains and later on pointed them to the web server where the content was.

I even set up two repositories on github to preserve the web sites because the djerome ttylinux github repositories simply vanished as well as the google group. If anyone has a copy of the archives, post a comment and I will make the archive available on the web.


Chop wood, carry water.
--
  = ^ . ^ =

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for doing this.

    I use ttylinux to host a couple of trivial web sites for family members. I was very disappointed to find out that the maintainer unilaterally deleted everything when I went to try to do some maintenance on those virtual machines.

    I don't know if there's anything I can do to help out, but I do have an interest in continuing to use it -- I love the fact that I can back the entire 6Mb server up trivially.

    I would really like to install enough Virtualbox extensions to support read-only external file systems, or do something similar with NSF (less desirable) or whatever the modern equivalent is for linux these days (I'm a decade or two behind the times), and was hoping to build ttylinux from source to enable me to do so.

    ReplyDelete