PortaLinux v0.12 Beta

NOTICE: This is an Beta Release

PortaLinux is a Linux-based operating system made to be as lightweight and versatile as possible. While it's mainly made for embedded systems, it can be used for containers, recovery partitions, rescue media, suckless Linux installs and more.

The root filesystem is built in the form of a gzipped cpio archive that can be booted as an initramfs, thus you will have to provide your own kernel (or you can compile the mainline/upstream one using kernel.rb). Its build system is built around the Ruby-powered PortaLinux Ports System, which allows you to easily customize the root filesystem and add your own packages.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

NOTICE: These metrics are based on stock PortaLinux. Adding more packages will make it heavier

Boot Requirements

• CPU: Intel 80486, ARMv5, RISCV-32
• Memory: 64MiB (x86), 32MiB (ARM/RISCV)
• Storage: 8-10MiB (Depends on arch)

Build Requirements

• CPU: Irrelevant. Memory and Storage are more important here
• Memory: 2GiB at 2 threads
• Storage: 16GiB

Build Dependencies

• Ruby >= 3.0 (for now, needs to be confirmed)
• GCC >= 9 / Clang >= 14
• Make >= 4.0
• CMake >= 3.0 (for compiling LLVM)
• Flex >= 2.0
• Bison >= 3.0
• GNU Awk >= 3.0
• Rsync (Required for Linux headers)

Contributions

Contributions to the root filesystem are not open yet, but you can submit packages for the Ports User Repo once that is fully set up.

v0.11 Maintenance Mode Notice

PortaLinux Release v0.11 will keep being maintained until v0.12 gets a proper release. Until v0.12-rootfs-test, v0.11 will remain at the project root, and v0.12 development will continue in v0.12/