I’ve been playing around with Thinstation Linux for work for the last year. I like it a lot. It’s lightweight, fast, modular, flexible, and simple yet powerful. There are smaller Linux distros (e.g. BlueFlops or Tomsrtbt), but for us Thinstation hits a sweet spot in power vs complexity.

Interesting fact about Thinstation: it comes from New Zealand. Its author is Miles Roper from the West Coast District Health Board. I think I need to go down the West Coast for some Monteiths training.

Thinstation is designed as a thin client operating system, so it has to be lightweight (thin clients don’t have grunty CPUs and normally no hard drive). Its purpose is just to get the computer started and connected to a big application server fast, with the applications then running up on the server. It’s Linux though, so it can be made to do a lot more than that.

Thinstation is not so much a distro, but a distro construction kit which you can use to create your own distro. (Though there are some prebuilt versions already available.) It is made up of a variety of packages which just need to be chosen and then built into a boot image. Once built Thinstation can boot off the network (PXE or Etherboot), CD/DVD (ISO), off a USB stick (SysLinux), or it can be installed onto a hard drive (SysLinux or LiLo).

The whole distro except for the kernel is built into a squashfs initrd, and then linuxrc (thinstation.init) mounts that read-only filesystem together with a tmpfs filesystem using unionfs as the writable (but not persistent) root filesystem. For a “normal” distro running linuxrc is only the first of many steps to booting, but for Thinstation once this completes it is 99% ready. This makes it fast. We have it booting in under 15 secs from a live CD.

Some examples of the packages included are: Samba server, X windows, IceWM, Dillo, and Vim, as well as the vital Base package. A package is just a directory with the files stored in their relative locations and a couple of special files like the package’s dependencies. Because it is so simple it is very easy to see how Thinstation packages work and easy to create new custom packages.

Thinstation: lightweight, fast, modular, flexible, and simple yet powerful = sweet