On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 10:51:27AM -0400, pa ul wrote:
> Can you tell me which is the lightest linux (use usb)
Linux from scratch (but not Linux From Scratch in particular), with a
stripped down kernel à la DSL (like Jean-François Messier mentioned),
some tiny userland (so definitely not GNU) consisting of *only* what you
need, built against some library other than Glibc (maybe musl).
Apparently DSL was revived, or at least as of 2012, it still includes a
ton of things you don't need. Don't know whether it supports EFI (the
kernel should, but the rest?), which *may* be applicable on some very
odd newer systems. Also, one of the original developers of DSL moved on
and is now working on Tiny Core.
http://tinycorelinux.net/
It says that the smallest image variant has a size of 9MB.
I've got a system at home that's 4MB in total, despite being built
against Glibc, and could easily create a 5MB image for your case.
Whether you could use it or not is another question. You'll need to
state that.
Not sure if you could use one of Aboriginal Linux's images. Pretty sure
that it was meant for virtual environments only. Could try anyhow.
They're pretty small.
However, since you don't seem to be running some embedded system, even
something like Arch Linux (which is in the middle by some standards,
certainly tiny compared to the stock versions of the big names—Ubuntu,
Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc.) will likely do. Heck, it's smaller than the
Knoppix one, and is both x86 and x86_64-compatible, and works on both
EFI and BIOS systems. CD and USB-boots, though I'm pretty sure that
that's a function of the motherboard, not the image, whether that's
supported or not.
The question you should ask yourself is ‘what balance of usability to
image size do I want’. Sounds like you may need to prefer the former.
> need to revover data/files from previous windows vista,
Actually, the key here is that the filesystem is likely NTFS. On the odd
chance that it's still FAT, you're still in luck. Linux supports that too.
Unless a particular Linux distribution has done something weird, it
should support NTFS or FAT, just like (to hazard a guess) most other
ones. There's little difference except the version of Linux bundled.
> I guess and I restored from HP`s install of the os.
What did you do exactly? Does the Vista installer support reinstalling
but keeping old data (e.g., removing most things in the filesystem, save
for user data)?
> I did not see my data. I need several files and folders from that
Sounds like the old filesystem was overwritten during the
reinstallation, or do you just have permission issues? For the former,
unless all the blocks of interest on disk were left intact by the
reinstallation, you're out of luck. Nothing to do with Linux or Windows.
You may need separate storage (than the image) to back your files up to,
given that most live environments that I know thereof are *volatile*,
i.e., nothing is saved, and said images are meant to be the sole thing
on disk.
Regards,
Alex Pilon
Attachment:
pgpXahc4WVgi1.pgp
Description: PGP signature