Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Now on to the very cool *nix link this week!
Bonzai Linux (formally called miniwoody) is a very compact Debian that fits onto 180mb CD. It is not a Live-CD like Knoppix, but an very tight version of Debian with an enhanced installer which does most of the grunt work for you.
With just 180MBs to work with there isn't a lot of room, yet Bonzai seems to be intended to get a user up and running quickly with the hardware essentials taken care of auto-magically.
Some of what it includes:
* shell applications
* automatic hardware detection
* magicfilter (to configure a printer)
* samba
* KDE 3.1.2
It also has a complete English and German environment.
I went ahead and gave the install a try on an old 366 E-machine. The install went very smoothly, and was very fast (by Debian standards). It is not a near options free install like Knoppix, but more like the traditional Debian install -- just a lot easier and faster do to auto hardware detection options.
Everything seemed to work right away, sound, X, DHCP network (though it didn't configure eth0 to boot automatically -- that was easy enough to fix).
To my pleasant surprise KDE 3.1.2 and it's apps load much faster than KDE 2.2 did on the same system.
I would not call it a complete desktop, but I think that may be the philosophy behind Bonzai. It gets you enough to get up and running and then it leaves it up to the individual to apt-get what s/he wants.
Unlike Knoppix, very few would remove any of the apps that Bonzai installs -- unless you just can't stand KDE on your hard-drive. ;)
One small suggestion for the author (if he follows the back link to here), it would be nice if Bonzai came with an apt/sources.list ready to suck down applications from the internet.
URLs:
[gnulinux.de...] German
[developer.berlios.de...]
