Any Chance of a LITE Version of Linuxcnc 2.7

With parallel ports being harder to find on small modern computers I have been re-using older HP Thin Clients to run CNC routers for a while, Most of them have very little drive space (1GB IDE flash cards). AT the moment i have to retrofit a old IDE 2.5" drive in them to run Linuxcnc.

Is there a way the creators could build an image without all the apps pre-installed in debian linux? A lot of them are not needed to just run equipment, Getting the image around 600mb would be awesome, I might take a look at doing it but im not that skilled with Linux lol.

What do you guys think?

Yeah,

I looked at a lot of distros based on debian, i did not see any that would stay under that size, Im looking at some different storage options at the moment, Im going to try some PATA to CF card adapters and see if i can get them to work, that would at least make them solid state storage, the old PATA hard drives are getting hard to find and when you do they are used and you never know how long they will last lol.

I also have a 16gb MSATA half card on order to see if i can use that, i hear the Half MSATA cards do not work in the Thin Client im using.

A Debian Jessie minimal install is about 840M.
Pulling LXDE to get a small desktop environment brings us close to 1.7G

We could go a bit lighter with just OpenBox, but ballpark will be between 1 and 1.5 GB -- unless we spend a significant amount of time in looking at what we need and don't.

Also that does not take in account any swap space -- obviously we should not swap, but better be safe than sorry...

Alternatives are the Lightweight distros , but unless we want to rebuild everything ourselves, the ones that are a bit recent and based on Debian (CrunchBang/BusenLabs) are already around the 1G

To avoid to have to permanently fight for space, I would look at solutions with about 4GB of storage space. Anything less than that will be a pain to maintain (4GB IDE flash cards are not that expensive...)

Thanks BigJohnT,

Ill take a look at openbox desktop, Im always playing with new distros that run on my normal computers, currently i run LMDE 2 on all my laptops and media servers.

Thanks Amedee,

I think what you are saying is what im looking into, the Thin Clients im using have a lot of options for adding storage, just not much room lol.

andypugh wrote:

Looking at the photo:

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251667939883

16GB shiould be plenty...

Nice find, I have not seen this type of disk on module before.

Also, depending on your "environment", an alternative could be to use these 'diskless'.

This is typically what I do with the small devices I have at home, as I have a file server running anyway. I do PXE boot if the device supports it, or just have the /boot partition on the device and the rest on the network (e.g. with Raspberry Pi's)