Looking For Lightweight Distro

[Aboogesnickle]

I am looking for a lightweight distro that I can use on a thin client right now and later replace with a raspberry pi.

I need the thin client/raspberry pi to stream a video to and from a monitor attached to it and display a page with upcoming scheduled visits.

I need it to be lightweight because the thin clients have 8g of flash memory and 4g RAM, but I believe the raspberry pi's have less. Right now the clients have a barebones windows 7 OS and a perl script to have it auto launch the scheduled visit page and visits. It uses Chrome to stream the video. Trying to slowing swap from the thin clients to raspberry pi, so I need something that will work on the raspberry pi.

Looking into a linux distro to cut down on cost and increase performance. Do not really know where to start.

I have done some research that is mostly leading to more questions. Please let me know if I need to provide more information on current system or what we are trying to move to.

 

[darry1966]

Devuan.
Welcome to this community.
https://devuan.org/

 

[arochester]

Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Linux_distribution and take your pick.

(Bog standard Devuan does not strike me as a particularly lightweight distro...)

 

[darry1966]

There are lightweight spins mentioned here:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewforum.php?id=9

 

[wizardfromoz]

Hi Aboogesnickle, hi all.

I know next to nothing about Raspberry Pi (yet!), but have trialled a number of lightweight Distros, and often refer Users to the Wikipedia page referenced by arochester above

A quick search under the keywords "linux lightweight distro thin client raspberry pi" provided a couple of articles of interest -

http://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/not-just-raspbian-10-linux-distros-pi-can-run/

and

https://peachosi.com/tags/raspberry-pi

I note that Bodhi Linux (pronounced as in "human body") features in a number of areas as being Pi-friendly. I have Bodhi as one of 40 or so Distros on the PC in the garage, and it works fine, but the jury is still out with me as to whether I like the Moksha Desktop, which is a fork from Enlightenment. http://www.bodhilinux.com/

Peach OSI has as its CEO one Jim Carpenter. I have made Jim's acquaintance on two or three occasions and he has been very helpful and prompt, but his is a small operation, which may be to the better, sometimes. I use Jim's Peach OSI TW (The Works) in the garage, but of particular interest perhaps is his Peach OSI BB (Bare Bones), and I have the 32-bit version on my wife's old Compaq Presario C300, which has only 60GB HDD and 512MB RAM. It works well. Curiously it does not feature in the Wikipedia article.

I hope the above is of some help, and good luck

avagudweegend, all

Wizard

 

[thr]

Well, you're in luck. Just finished writing a list of 50+ lightweight Linux distros. Check it out, you'll definitely find one that suits you. Although 4GB RAM is not that "light", all of these distros will work fine.