You probably also need to read the release notes.

TinyMe is a distribution of Linux which comes as a 250MB LiveCD ¹⁾. Our vision is to provide a 250MB installable LiveCD image which is fully compatible with Unity Linux and Mandriva.

From November 2006 to February 2009, TinyMe was based on PCLinuxOS. In February and March 2009, Unity Linux split off from PCLinuxOS.

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 reduced 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, Slitaz, TinyCore, AntiX, etc. Those distros generally do not come in 700MB versions. Puppy is ~100MB and DSL is < 50MB.

In 2010, it became evident that 200 MB ISO was no longer maintainable, due to growth in various programs. I decided to raise the size limit to 250 MB for the i586 ISO. For the x86_64 ISO, I don't really have a size limit, but it usually comes out about 260 MB. My goal is to make the 2 ISOs functionally and aesthetically identical.

I get a fair number of people from time to time saying I should raise the size of the ISO. Or sometimes I get people asking how I can possibly call it TinyMe when Slitaz is 35 MB, Tiny Core's “full-sized” edition is 64 MB, and Puppy is ~100 MB. My answer is that TinyMe offers a few things the others don't, like the Mandriva Control Center, a good packaging system, and a large repository. ²⁾

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 250MB 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.

We have to look at what each web browser offers, then take a look at the overall goal. The overall goal is to create a 250MB ISO.

When trying to decide what web browser to use for TinyMe 2008, we looked at a lot of featherweight browsers. You would have found 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.

TinyMe 2008 shipped with Opera as the web browser. Various testing releases of TinyMe in 2010 and 2011 shipped with Midori. Currently the browser being used for TinyMe 2012 is NetSurf.

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.

Over 98% of the applications in TinyMe are provided via the Mandriva repositories. It would probably be best to use Mandriva channels to request packages.