Introduction

MiniSUSE is packed with all the great packages you already know, offering you a Swiss army knife for all your Linux needs - still it is small enough to fit a CD/DVD or USB drive. You can use it to rescue systems, format drives, check sensors or hack whatever you want. If you are looking for a small, but extremely useful Linux distribution you can get up and running in seconds from the media of your choice, look no further :)

MiniSUSE is not (just) a small version of openSUSE to be used in production enviroments. It is rather a distribution that you can use in emergency situations, when you simply need a small and fast Linux distribution up and running with all the basic and extra tools you probably have on your own Linux box.
MiniSUSE now includes a basic graphical desktop with IceWM.
Also, YaST is now included - so you can use your favourite openSUSE tool for configuring MiniSUSE.

Feel free to open an account at SUSE Studio, and clone the appliance - so you can include custom packages, configurations, patterns or whatever you would like! Also, feel free to contact me (see bottom of page) and send your ideas, questions or any type of feedback!

Features

MiniSUSE is an openSUSE based Linux distribution, featuring all the standard things you can expect from such an operating system.
As a plus, MiniSUSE includes a lot of useful features, packages and software that standard distributions does not have by default.
The mentionable features include:

• chntpw and built in ntfs support to rescue Windows systems
• the aircrack-ng suite, dsniff, nmap, fping, tcpdump, iperf etc. to hack, sniff, debug, diagnose networks
• parted, fdisk, rsync, rdiff, (de)compression tools etc. to deal with backups and storage
• gawk, hwinfo, man pages, sensors, smartmontools, wodim etc. for your general Linux needs

Documentation, Tutorials

There is no documentation for MiniSUSE at the moment. You should only memorize the phrase "MiniSUSE", as this is the password for both the user "linux" and root on the system.
All the man pages are included and most of the TLDP.

You might want to check out some of the features, described with a little tutorial feeling at the (imaginary) case stories page.

Screenshots

Some of you requested some screenshots, so here is MiniSUSE in action:

Download

Visit MiniSUSE at SUSE Studio for the latest version, or use the following permanent links:

• USB & Flash or Hard Disk image
• Preload ISO
• CD & DVD, ISO image
• Open Virtualization Format (OVF)
• VMWare / VirtualBox / KVM image
• Xen guest image
• EC2 Cloud image

ChangeLog

• 12.1.0
  • Updated to openSUSE 12.1
  • Added autofs
  • Changed to PAE kernel
  • Package and repository fixes
  • Versioning now reflects the openSUSE version, that miniSUSE is based on
  • Hyper-V image is now available
• 3.0.6 (still available, based on 11.4)
  • Added netcfg (/etc/services)
  • Added a custom init script (for you to customize)
• 3.0.4
  • Added rdesktop
  • New design
  • Name (and default passwords) changed to miniSUSE
• 3.0.3
  • Added NFS support
  • EC2 image available
• 3.0.2
  • Upgrade to openSUSE 11.4
  • Upgraded chntpw, aircrack-ng
  • Added pigz, pbzip
  • Removed dsniff, alsa, yast2-firewall, yast2-firstboot, consolekit-doc
  • Banned cracklib-dict-full
  • Default runlevel is 3 (no GUI)
• 2.0.3 (still available, based on 11.3)
  • Added gpart, dmidecode, rdiff-backup, grub2
  • Added a minimal GUI with IceWM
  • Banned some unnecessary packages
• 1.1.0 (still available, no GUI)
  • Added YaST with basic modules
  • Added sudo, eject
• 1.0.2 (still available, no GUI, no YaST2)
  • Upgrade to openSUSE 11.3
  • Cleanup of unneccessary libraries, packages
  • Added kpartx, man-pages-posix
  • Added dos2unix, patch, recode, colordiff, lv
  • Added tar, p7zip, zip, unzip, unrar
  • Removed irssi
• 0.5.1 (still available, no GUI, no YaST2 and is based on 11.2)
  • New user linux:MiniSUSE
  • Added hwinfo
• 0.4.4
  • Changed time zone to Global/UTC
  • Cleanup of unneccessary libraries, packages
  • Added parted
  • Added rsync
  • Added wodim
  • Added screen
  • Added w3m, irssi
  • Added findutils-locate, pwgen
  • Added chntpw
  • Added iperf, dsniff
  • Added strace
• 0.3.0
  • Added iptools
  • Added man, man-pages
  • Added aircrack
• 0.2.5
  • Added curl, wget
  • Custom boot theme
  • Fixed locale problem (language set to POSIX everywhere)
  • All locales are set to English (US) and time zone to Europe/London (GMT)
  • Removed some unnecessary packages
  • Deleted all the software patterns, only basic software remains
• 0.1.0
  • First public release

Support, Contact

Feel free to contact me at minisuse@hgj.hu