Baslinux mailing list

[David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

3aoo-cvfd wrote:
> Samual Acorn wrote:
> >
> > im not a big fan of 'media' players... xmms for music,
> > xine for movies...
>
> What's wrong with a single binary (mplayer) that does
> music, movies and streaming media?   Isn't David's
> mplayer smaller than your xmms/xine stuff?

Probably, but xmms can do eyecandy and earcandy (realtime
audio plugin filters) that mplayer cannot do.

Why are you using xine, Samual? I tried xine on a bigger
distribution a while back, and I noticed that it refused to
read many files which mplayer could play quite happily.

> > opera is adware/shareware... and it doesnt do CSS properly...
>
> Opera is now free.  No ads.

It's still not open source. But I am not complaining.

> I haven't noticed any CSS problems with the latest version
> (which I have running on BL2).

I think Mozilla has quite a few CSS bugs. According to Secunia,
Opera is one of the least buggy web browsers. And it is much
smaller than most large browsers, while still providing many
features.

> > i only install what i want from big distros
>
> I doubt it.  I reckon your big-distro installation is
> filled with stuff you don't use.

And I reckon that it is probably also filled with more bugs than
BL, which are a consequence of making software more complex.

> > my point was is that i can install -from cd- not over the web...
>
> So do I.  I have a Slackware 4.0 CDrom for BL3.
> And Slackware 7.1 and 8.1 CDroms for BL2.

You can also usually use non-Slackware distributions if you can
figure out how to convert the packages to Slackware .tgz type.

> > > Busybox telnet is easily replaced.
> > why replace when the real one can be installed in the first place....
>
> Because the real one is much, much bigger.  If I used
> "real" binaries in BasicLinux, it would need 10 floppies
> instead of 2.

Or you would need to leave out functionality, as you did with
BL2 (which had a full bash and full (but older) glibc but no
GUI).

> > i have chopped up installs made out of redhat components...
>
> That's how BasicLinux started (except that I stripped down
> a Slackware installation).  I wanted to get Linux down to
> the minimal essentials (like booting a 3-file DOS: io.sys,
> msdos.sys and command.com).

In the future, once uClibc hits its stride, do you think that
it will be possible to get it down even further to the
essentials?

David