Knoppix
by Klaus Knopper is a bootable CD with a collection of
GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and
support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and
USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used
as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or
adapted and used as a platform for commercial software
product demos. It is not necessary to install anything
on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD
can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on
it. A kix (Knoppix mini CD) is now available in the
contrib directory.
MuLinux by Michele Andreoli
tomsrtbt
http://www.toms.net/~toehser/rb/
"The most Linux on one floppy. (distribution or panic disk)." by Tom Oehser
Trinux
http://www.trinux.org
"A Linux Security Toolkit" by Matthew D. Franz
LRP "Linux Router Project"
http://www.psychosis.com/linux-router/
hal91
http://home.sol.no/~okolaas/hal91.html
floppyfw
http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
by Thomas Lundquist
minilinux
(seems no more valid) or
minilinux
monkey
DLX by Erich Boem
C-RAMDISK
http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/images/
BABEL
http://celsius-software.hypermart.net/babel/
"A mini-distribution to run games"
Xdenu
http://xdenu.tcm.hut.fi/
, quotating Alan Cox: "Xdenu is a small distribution
program that installs as a set of DOS zips onto a DOS partition and gives
you a complete X11 client workstation."
LOAF
http://www.ecks.org/loaf/
pocket-linux
http://pocket-linux.coven.vmh.net/
FLUF
http://www.upce.cz/~kolo/fluf.htm
YARD
http://www.croftj.net/~fawcett/yard/
TLinux
http://members.xoom.com/ror4/tlinux/
ODL
SmallLinux
by Steven Gibson. Three disk micro-distribution of Linux and utilities.
Based on kernel 1.2.11. Root disk is ext2 format and has
fdisk and mkfs.ext2 so that a
harddisk install can be done. Useful to boot up on old machines with
less than 4MB of RAM.
cLIeNUX
by Rick Hohensee client-use-oriented Linux distribution
linux-lite
by Paul Gortmaker for very small systems with less
than 2MB RAM and 10MB harddisk space (1.x.x kernel)
See also the packages at
MetaLab
formerly known as SunSite
and the
Boot-Disk-HOWTO
.
You may also consider some of the boot floppies provided by various
distributions falling into this category, e.g. the boot/rescue floppy of
Debian/GNU Linux.
If you like to build your own flavour of a boot floppy you may do so
manually, as described in the
Boot-Disk-HOWTO
or using some helper tools, for instance mkrboot (provided at least as a
Debian/GNU Linux package) or pcinitrd, which is
part of the PCMCIA-CS package by David Hinds.
Also you might try to build your Linux system on a ZIP drive. This is
described in the
ZIP-Install-mini-HOWTO
.