I'm looking for an small ISO for making a live CD. I need all the usual linux command line stuff (ls, dd, nc, fsck, etc.) but almost nothing more. A really stripped GUI would be nice but I can live with system terminals. Ideally, the ISO would be under 50MB so I can put it on a credit card sized CD.
Linux – ISO for a “utility” live Linux CD
iso-imagelinuxlivecd
Best Answer
SystemRescueCd (www.sysresccd.org) is a good choice here. It's small enough (<300MB) but also feature-packed and one of the better "utility" CDs. Any sort of boot failure involving failed mounts, filesystem corruptions and the like can be repaired with this (unless your harddrive is dead of course). It's also got a lovely xfce GUI which is relatively light on resources.
Oops, I read 50MB as 500MB. It's way too big. Sorry. I'm investigating how much it can be stripped down at the moment, you can use these instructions to recompile it with less stuff. I imagine you won't want the GNU toolchain, xfce/x11, or portage/emerge either. Come to think of it, it may just be easier to go with DSL/Puppy. I swear by the full ISO for a mostly portable utility CD though.