The CRUX Linux 0.9.1 experience

by , 11 January, 2002

Browsing through the Linux From Scratch mailing list archive (nice follow-on from my last column that), someone mentioned CRUX Linux, "CRUX Linux? Never heard of it. I'm bored, might as well check it out."

"Hmmm, lightweight. Sweet. i686-optimized. Super-sweet (being an Athlon owner). Better check this baby out."

The ISO factor

Now for admission time. About 20% of me was switched on by the lightweight factor, 60% by the i686-optimised factor, and 20% by the fact that in all the years I've been into computing, I've never downloaded an ISO, or burnt one to CD. I've had Net-access for about five years now and a CD-writer for about two, maybe three years.

You see in all that time on the Net I've only had 56k dial-up access, and only for the last few years (in the UK) have I not had to pay by the minute to surf. In fact I've only ever had the one modem! (An external "Motorola ModemSurfr 56k".) Testament to the fact that Motorola make damn fine modems, even if their website is truly the worst site for navigating, in existence, ever. (Being a once upon a time, massive fan of the Amiga, I'll likely burn in Hell for that outburst.)

So as should be crystal-clear, the 413Mb CRUX 0.9.1 ISO was one hell of a task for a dial-up. With the biggest download I've ever done, being 91Mb (for OpenOffice 641) I was the regular "hypochondriac" expecting the md5sum check to ensure the download was perfect to fail. To my relief though, it checked out A-Ok.

By the way, for big downloads, get yourself WebDownloader for X to allow you to stop and resume downloads at leisure.

As for burning the ISO to CD, I knew this to be simple, and sure enough it was. (Just set-up X-CD-Roast, which is a relatively straightforward task, and see the X-CD-Roast FAQ for details on burning an ISO.)

Introducing CRUX

This from the Web site:

"CRUX is a lightweight, i686-optimized Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users. The primary focus of this distribution is "keep it simple", which is reflected in a simple tar.gz-based package system, BSD-style initscripts, and a relatively small collection of trimmed packages. The secondary focus is utilization of new Linux features and recent tools and libraries."

In other words, if you're a beginner, forget about it. If you don't have i686 architecture, again, forget about it. (Although there is a contributed i586 base-install-only ISO version, and only 188.4MB to download.)

The definite stand-out point about CRUX is it uses the new devfs. First time I've used it, but always liked the sound of it. In a nutshell, with devfs, you use /dev/discs/disc0/part2 rather than /dev/hda2, and the files in the /dev directory are created dynamically, existing only because that device is present on your system. So no more hundreds of device files you'll never go near. devfs truly is a superb improvement.

Another first for me is ReiserFS. I now have installed on the one hard drive, Red Hat Linux 7.2 running Ext3, Linux From Scratch 3.1 running Ext2, and CRUX 0.9.1 running ReiserFS. How's that for variety. :)

By the way, I should also mention that CRUX 0.9.1 was released on the 3rd October, and 0.9.2 is to be released before the end of January.

On the package side of things, CRUX 0.9.1 runs the 2.4.10 kernel, XFree86 4.1.0, WindowMaker 0.65.1, GCC 2.95.3, Glibc 2.2.4, Perl 5.6.1, Netscape 4.78, XMMS 1.2.5, and X-Chat 1.8.4. Everything to keep you occupied, without filling your hard drive.

Package management

Something that stands out with CRUX, aside from devfs, is its package management.

pkgadd, pkgrm, pkginfo, and pkgmk; install, uninstall, inspect, and make packages respectively.

A package consists of a tarball, in the form *.pkg.tar.gz, containing the binaries and text files created by a compile. Contributed packages to help extend CRUX can be found at the site. When creating your own packages, the CRUX philosophy is all binaries (aside from library files) should be stripped (debugging information removed) to minimise their size, all man-pages should be compressed with gzip -9, and (from the site):

"Junk files should be removed (e.g. info-pages, READMEs, /usr/doc/*, etc). This may also include binary junk files, /usr/games/banner and /sbin/mkfs.minix found in util-linux are such examples."

The belief being that man-pages are plenty documentation, and for anything more, there's the Net. In light of the ridiculous amount of documentation installed by many Linux distributions, it's hard to argue with this logic.

Installation

Now comes the fun part. Installation. With the one, brief installation text file featured on the CD, I was prepared to do battle. Fun things were involved like fdisk, mkreiserfs, swapon, package selection with no dependency-checking, compiling a kernel, and editing configuration files. Truth is, it wasn't that difficult (or maybe I just got lucky), but unless you're comfortable with the above, it's likely you should avoid CRUX for now.

The only part you get an actual text-based installer, is with the package selection, the rest is done on the command-line. My take? Clean, simple, and fun, fun, fun.

Starting-for the first time

To begin with I had to run xf86config to configure X, after that I had to add exec wmaker to ~/.xinitrc, and run wmaker.inst to boot into WindowMaker, rather than the basic in the extreme, TWM. After that it's a case of starting XMMS, inserting an MP3 CD, and getting on with configuring everything to my liking. Simple really.

Here's to eagerly awaiting the release of CRUX 0.9.2, recommended for all you i686, ISO geeks. CRUX has plenty to make it stand out from the crowd. And that's how it should be. Variety is the spice of Linux, and everyone knows, "The spice must flow." Well done CRUX, you get the thumbs-up.

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