[xdude]

What are the best when it comes to the smallest Linux Distros for Desktop computers mainly for those legacy machines? I'm talking about Desktops and Laptops, servers. I used something called Damn Small Linux a few years back but it seems the whole thing is gone. The site is gone but can find old distros on Torrent sites and some other places but I guess these are pretty much outdated. I noticed there is a new one very similar to this called Tiny Core Linux. I will try this once since this is the smallest one I found for one.
There are few other nice-looking distros such as Porteus, Puppy Linux, Slitaz, etc. From these Slitaz seems impressive since you can have it lite as 16MB RAM and less than 80MB disk space.

[rudra]

tiny core Linux is damn impressive for what it can do at its size. though it uses busybox and mostly good for wired internet users.

I suggest you try alpine linux, puppy linux, knoppix. i used them to really good effect for using old machines or running systems from ram.

[xdude]

These are the Recommended Minimum System Requirements for bionic pup64. This puppy has grown in to a dog !!

2 GHz dual core processor.
2 GiB RAM (system memory)
25 GB of hard-drive space (or USB stick, memory card or external drive but see LiveCD for an alternative approach)
VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution.
Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB port for the installer media.

[ikk157]

I highly recommend raspbian. It is extremely light weight and gives you the majority of the linux experience. This is because it was designed for the raspberry pi which is on the low end side of things when it comes to hardware, hence needing a light operating system specifically designed for it.

However, they’ve made a desktop version, which you can install on pretty much an laptop or pc.

[xdude]

Raspbian Looks quite small indeed. Looks good too. But now what I'm looking for is something which I can set up in a USB drive and run it from there without putting anything on a hard drive. Are there any which you can install into a 4GB USB drive run from there. One with basic things like media playing, web browser, etc. Let's say RAM is not the issue here and have 2GB-4GB RAM.

[ikk157]

Raspbian Looks quite small indeed. Looks good too. But now what I'm looking for is something which I can set up in a USB drive and run it from there without putting anything on a hard drive. Are there any which you can install into a 4GB USB drive run from there. One with basic things like media playing, web browser, etc. Let's say RAM is not the issue here and have 2GB-4GB RAM.

I’m quite positive that raspbian can actually be installed on and run on a small capacity usb flash drive. Try downloading the desktop version and see if you can “burn” the disk image onto the usb flash drive. I would love to know the outcome!

[xdude]

I’m quite positive that raspbian can actually be installed on and run on a small capacity usb flash drive. Try downloading the desktop version and see if you can “burn” the disk image onto the usb flash drive. I would love to know the outcome!

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any method for this. All tutorials I have found so far are about running it on Raspbian Pi's with a  SD card and USB drive. Even that need a USB drive with at least 16GB space. Looks like most of those small distros need an 8GB or bigger USB.

[ikk157]

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any method for this. All tutorials I have found so far are about running it on Raspbian Pi's with a  SD card and USB drive. Even that need a USB drive with at least 16GB space. Looks like most of those small distros need an 8GB or bigger USB.

I did some of my own research and came to the same dead end as you did.

However, I thought of something that COULD work.

Download the raspbian desktop image (not the raspberry pi version, the pc version). Flash it into another usb flash drive (not the one you want to install it on) like you would to let’s say, create a bootable windows installation drive. Boot from it, then plug in the usb flash drive you want to install raspbian on. When you come to the prompt where it asks where you want to install it, see if the usb flash drive appears, and choose it instead of choosing your hard drive. The rest should be self-explanatory. You might have to try formatting the usb flash drive to different filesystems and see which one is detected by the installation.

Yet again, this COULD work. I have never tried it. For a matter of fact, I just came up with it. If you decide to give it a try, please update me on the outcome.

Good luck!

[Mashiro]

What @ikk157 has mentioned in their post above is very much possible and does work. I do however NOT recommend to do this. It can easily break during updates. I did the exact same with a different Linux distribution and a USB 3.0 SSD instead of a USB thumb drive. During a normal update something bascially disconnected and reconnected the SSD on that the OS has been running... it killed the update and the whole OS froze up. After the SSD was reconnected nothing improved. I had to hard shutdown the computer and after booting up again the installation was damaged.

Only god knows why and how the OS decided to kick out the disk on that it is running during a OS update. I doubt it was doing USB 3.0 driver updates or something siimilar. Those drivers are included in the kernel for ages now and work very well.

If you plan to do this: BE CAREFUL!

Depending on the installation routine you can format the USB thumb drive properly in the installer to create necessary partitions like /boot, swap and / (root). If not then I would suggest to load up gparted and create the partitions yourself to select them in the installer later.

[LightDestory]

First just to reply to @ikk157 there is a easier way to do that: it is called persistent installation and software like Rufus can make it with a ISO and a USB drive without emulating an installation.
I have to say that this particular installation is possible thanks to a recently fix provided by Rufus' developer to the Linux community and it works on distributions that merged this patch: Debian, Ubuntu, ect...

I don't know if the mentioned small linux distros are well updated as normal distros. If your target distro is not compatible with Rufus, well you have already describe the only way to get a persistent installation of Linux on a USB drive.

To @xdude and @"Hidden Refuge" Don't you know that we can actually run Linux from RAM? It is faster then running a OS from a USB 3.0 (that on older machine will be downgraded to 2.0).

There are a few distros that runs directly from ram and the requirement of ram is a mind-blowing range!
You start froma distros called SliTaz that works 64MB of RAM!
SliTaz is an extreme and really bare-bone Linux distro, if you get more RAM you can choose between more distros that are more likely "daily usage".
IF you get 2GB+ of RAM I suggest:

• Tin Hat Linux, the last release is 4 year ago but it is the so far stable and rich distros of this type.
  
• Slax, a good distro capable of running on RAM and stays persistent if good conditions meet.
  
• Puppy Linux, the most famous lightweight distro that can ALSO run from ram.
  

I will not list every Distros capable of running from RAM, you can find a useful list on Wikipedia from this link

Regards,

LightDestory.