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.
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| 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.
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| 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"
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| 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.
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| 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.
-- = ^ . ^ =
Thanks for doing this.
ReplyDeleteI 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.