VMWare Linux image with small footprint

Question

I have an embedded system running on a Linux platform. What we want to do now is to test all applications running on a minimal Linux distro in a vmware environment. I try to find a very small footprint distribution which can be ran in VMWare. The requirements are really only to have the Linux distro without pretty much any servers since we run DropBear / BusyBox for remote communications. The smaller the footprint, the more instances we will be able to run on our VMWare server.

Does anybody have recommendations on any small Linux distros/appliances without X, web servers etc etc? The ones I find contains lots of functionality not needed and are either very old or very large.

Answer 1

Plain Ubuntu JeOS runs with about 16 megabytes of memory. This Ubuntu distro specialized for virtual servers.

Answer 2

There's also Tomsrtbt, which fits in a floppy. Other floppy-sized distros are available on the Linux Links site.

Answer 3

DSL. Damn Small Linux

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Answer 4

Arch Linux is renowned for its small footprint base system. Arch adheres to the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle.

In the default install, Arch Linux does come without any service or X.

Answer 5

look here

http://bengross.com/smallunix.html

Answer 6

Slitaz and TinyCore would both work pretty well.

Answer 7

Why not build a build of your embedded environment for x86, and run that in a VMware session? Then you would have a matching OS (& libc, kernel version, compiler, etc.) environment, just running on a (potentially) different host processor. That would minimize the potential differences between the test environment the embedded target.