TinyMe is a distribution of Linux which comes as a 200MB LiveCD. Our vision is to provide a 200MB installable LiveCD image which is fully compatible with Unity Linux.

From November 2006 to February 2009, TinyMe was based on PCLinuxOS. In February and March 2009, over half the core development team of PCLinuxOS split off to create Unity Linux.

Originally, when this project started, we were trying to take PCLinuxOS .93a MiniMe and shrink it. I jokingly said that MiniMe -a 300MB ISO- was too bloated and suggested we try to create a 100MB ISO. When PCLinuxOS 2007 came out, I was working solo on TinyMe. Gettinther quickly joined me and immediately became my right-hand man as he knew how to package RPMs and I didn't. After working on it a while, it became apparent that not only was 100MB probably impossible, it would be quite impractical. So I conferred with Gettinther and decided to sacrifice some space for functionality and reluctantly changed the size limit to 200MB. For the Droplet releases, I will be reducing it to 150MB.

Note I am very, very firm about the size remaining small. It is key that the space in the ISO be used in an efficient manner. After all, our name is TinyMe. I don't consider 700MB to be Tiny. We are competing with distros like Puppy, DSL, Minibuntu, Feather, Austrumi, AntiX, etc. Those distros generally do not come in 700MB versions. Puppy is 90MB and DSL is ⇐50MB.

I love to hear about applications which do their job in a small footprint, especially if they're applications we don't currently have in the repositories.

With that said, there is a reason for the 200MB size. Linux offers a wide range of applications with similar capabilities. The ones you prefer might not be to the taste of another. The minimal aspect of TinyMe allows you to add what you want so that it can become what you want. You could consider TinyMe a blank canvas on which to build your dream setup.

If you wish to suggest that some program be included in future releases of TinyMe, I would suggest you see how much it inflates your install.

Opera and Firefox achieve basically the same function: browsing the web. So we have to look at what each offers, then take a look at the overall goal. The overall goal is to create a 200MB ISO.

When trying to decide what web browser to use for TinyMe 2008, we looked at a lot of featherweight browsers. You will find these in the PCLinuxOS repositories: links-graphic, Dillo, NetSurf, and one or two others. At first I didn't want to go with Opera because it's so big compared to some of these other browsers. However, it quickly became apparent that we were going to have to make the sacrifice in size to get the compatibility we needed. Those other browsers just didn't cut it at the time.

Byte for byte you can't match the performance of Opera. While Firefox has the advantage of working with a few more pages than Opera, greater popularity, and extensions, there are other, greater factors which cause us to go with Opera over Firefox for TinyMe 2008:

• Size: Firefox is huge. Opera is no slim Jim, but it's still about 1/3 the size of Firefox. Putting Firefox on means in order to keep the ISO within the target size, I would have to remove a ton of applications from the TinyMe release as Firefox + dependencies are a huge space hog. This would reduce the functionality of TinyMe, not increase it.
• Speed: Opera is faster than Firefox. This fits with the Tiny philosophy of increasing speed wherever we can.
• Features: Opera also has a mail client, Bittorrent, and IRC chat.
• Memory: Opera uses less memory than Firefox. This fits with the Tiny philosophy of keeping things light.

The popularity of the browser really doesn't have a huge factor in deciding whether it gets included or not. While Firefox is rightly quite popular, it doesn't fit the Tiny philosophy. Besides, Firefox is easy enough to add.

For TinyMe 2010, a choice has been made to use Midori. Midori is a very adept browser in a very lightweight package. While it doesn't contain all the same functionality as Opera, at 500KB it's a fraction of the size.

Over 98% of the applications in TinyMe are provided via the Unity repositories. The Unity developers have a forum set up where members may request packages be included in the repositories. Please follow the rules laid out for suggesting packages. The forum is located at: http://www.unity-linux.org/forum/

Note we strongly encourage you to request packages via the Unity forum; however, if you strongly wish to not join the Unity forum, you may use the Suggestion Box on the forum to suggest a package be added.