http://batley.com.au/thinstation/

ThinStation is a thin client Linux distribution that makes a PC a full-featured thin client.

• fast:- boots in 15secs

• lightweight:- <15Mb disk, <50Mb RAM

• well supported

• great connectivity:- that is after all it's purpose in life

http://thinstation.sourceforge.net

See also my Thinstation Linux blog post.

Thinstation includes the whole distro in a squashfs initrd, and then linuxrc (thinstation.init) mounts that read-only filesystem together with a tmpfs filesystem using unionfs as the writable (but not persistent) root filesystem.

It has it's own package and build system which makes it easy to build a PXE image, Live CD, Syslinux image and some others.

Interesting fact about ThinStation: it comes from NewZealand. It's author is Miles Roper from the West Coast District Health Board. I think I need to go down the West Coast for some Monteiths training.

Building a custom kernel is pretty straight forward though the documentation is a bit out of date. All building is done in a chroot jail so that the environment linked in matches that in the distributed OS not the host OS. To do the chroot you must be root, but building the kernel as root is not recommended, so it's a [WikiPedia:catch-22]. I just built as root, maybe I should have tried suing to another user inside the chroot jail? though I'd have to create that user first, oh well.

CategoryDistro