Mastering the smallest Linux desktop distro

The general sequence of baking a standard Poky Linux image is pretty straightforward – see Tam Hanna’s tutorial in LXF251. In short, you start by preparing your rhost system for building by installing development packages such as gawk, texinfo and diffstat. Then grab the Poky code from the Yoctoproject Git repository, initialise the build environment with the bundled script, and start baking ( $ bitbake <some image> ).

This last part is very resource intensive. You’ll need to set aside several hours, during which time your host system will be bogged down by Bitbake, and you’ll also need to make sure you have at least 70GB of free disk space, otherwise there won’t be enough room for Bitbake to do its job. All the extra software parts added on top of the minimal image also require gigabytes of free disk space, so don’t cut this corner.

These are just the minimum requirements for getting a tiny bootable Linux distribution up and running, which occupies just tens of megabytes on its own. On the other hand, most processes in Poky are well automated and therefore introduce far fewer difficulties than, say, the Linux From Scratch () build routine.