Suggest me special purpose distros

[wheeze]

Ubuntu mini.iso

Make into any specialist thing you wish.

[Lemuriano]

The Amnesic Incognito Live System (tails) aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.

http://ur1.ca/8ozk6

Regards.

[sakamoto]

puppy linux (and especially the saluki variant) it runs 100% from RAM and is faster than light

Saluki is an ultralight Linux distro with an XFCE desktop based on Puppy Linux.
While Puppy Linux is designed to resurrect old hardware, Saluki is designed with newer hardware, netbooks, and modern processors in mind.


The goal is a lightweight, easy to use, high performance OS that works out of the box with minimal configuration. It is small enough to run completely from RAM or boot from and save changes to USB sticks or rewritable CDs. It can also be installed alongside other OSes without partitioning the hard drive.


Saluki, like Puppy, runs in single user mode. It is primarily intended for single user computers where speed, simplicity, productivity, and convenience is paramount. It never asks for passwords unless encryption is enabled.

If you'd like to build your own custom lightweight OS, Saluki can easily be remastered with custom applications, custom kernels, and custom artwork

http://saluki-linux.com/

[houseworkshy]

ArtistX is good for seeing what's around for media. I haven't tried it on a hard drive install as I don't need the lot, prefer to hd install only what I want, so don't know how well it runs that way.
Puppy is very nice. One of the things one can do with it is install various things you need durings a live session and then easily remaster a bootable cd which will include them. So using it one can create ones own bespoke versions for various task areas/machines. Other people have done a lot of this and one could, if wished, download their "pupplets". One crit of puppy is the lack of a password system, that is easily fixed but if you can't be bothered at least one pupplet has implemented it already; "Fatdog"

[sakamoto]

ArtistX is good for seeing what's around for media. I haven't tried it on a hard drive install as I don't need the lot, prefer to hd install only what I want, so don't know how well it runs that way.
Puppy is very nice. One of the things one can do with it is install various things you need durings a live session and then easily remaster a bootable cd which will include them. So using it one can create ones own bespoke versions for various task areas/machines. Other people have done a lot of this and one could, if wished, download their "pupplets". One crit of puppy is the lack of a password system, that is easily fixed but if you can't be bothered at least one pupplet has implemented it already; "Fatdog"

agreed - being forced to be root is indeed a security issue

[Ravi5kumar]

I never used any other distro other than ubuntu since I starting linux since 2010. But I am curious to know about ArchLinux and Fedora! Well also might try other disto as well......

[LiamOS]

As far as making a specialist distro goes, you can do a lot with Gentoo. It does take a fair lot of effort to do what it is you want, but Portage offers so much as far as customisation goes once you get the hang of it.
Arch is pretty good too, but the dependency tree is much bigger, so you'll be pulling in a lot of things you may not need when you install packages.

Ubuntu mini.iso

Make into any specialist thing you wish.

As good as apt and Ubuntu are, Ubuntu minimal is really not that suited to minimal installations or crazy customisation out of the box. Arch is the embodiment of a binary distribution for that, in my opinion.

[jackyboy633]

VortexBox (Fedora based) is a great distro for a Squeezebox/Sonos/SMB/DLNA music server. I have used it myself on a old Eee PC and it works really well.
TinyCore is also another great distro that is literally only 12 or so megabytes large, and so it is very well suited as a distro for appliances or just for general hacking. It is pretty hard to use though.

Hope this helps,
Jackyboy633