MuLinux

When all you've got is one floppy disk and you need a fully functional form of Linux, what're you gonna do? Simple ”you're going to find a machine with a working Net connection, head off to http://sunsite.auc.dk/mulinux/ , and grab this full-featured floppy distribution. Using from one to five floppies (at my last count), this variant was developed by an insanely clever Italian by the name of Michele Andreoli (send him a postcard or two ”he deserves them). Mr. Andreoli went so far as to rewrite almost all command line utilities as shell scripts in order to save space. Based on the x series of kernels , there are add-on floppies for Perl, SSH, tcl/tk, X- windows and even more things.

A Web browser and server are included, and this is a perfectly viable system for a single user . It runs entirely out of RAM (quite well, provided you've got at least 16MB of it), so it's a great platform for tinkering around with Linux when you don't want to repartition your hard drive. It's also a great way to learn how to shell script ”simply examine how Mr. Andreoli rewrote grep, for example.

It's also a fabulous sniffing station and hardware verifier. I've used it to determine if video cards and NICs really are bad, or if it was just the primary OS that was misconfigured. I've also used it to turn an abandoned PC into a network sniffing station, making this alternately a convenient tool for a network administrator and a cracker's dream.

MuLinux is really, really cool. Check it out. I carry a couple of MuLinux floppies in my pack ”you never know when you just might need a tiny version of Linux!