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Will tinyCore let me use APT? I am looking forward to use a very light version of Linux on a netbook or something. For the last few years I been using Linux Mint and I like it, but I am getting tired of it, since it is too big to my taste now, and I want an easier, faster and more lightweight one, however I am used to apt-get in Ubuntu and Debian.

I only use my computers for coding and web development stuff, so I don't want to get my hands dirty on a Linux stuff for long, all I need is a lightweight OS that doesn't look stupid and big, vim and a browser to test. However, APT is important to me; will it work with TinyCore or something similar?

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    Compared to tinyCore apt is an enourmous package with huge depencies. Even if you could get it working it would be larger than the entire tinyCore distribution including GUI. If you want apt, maybe you're better off with a lightweight Debian based distribution, or just maybe a minimal Debian installation would already suit your needs. That's the easier way IMO. – Marco Mar 20 '13 at 16:14
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    I agree with Marco. People are often looking for a "lightweight" distro when what they really need to focus on is details and configuration. I promise all of the major distos are used in production environments more restrictive than a netbook. I have a raspberry pi (single core 600Mhz ARM processor with 1GB ram, which is worse than a cheap phone) running debian wheezy. No problems. Do I try to run eclipse and firefox in KDE with it? No. It can't handle that effectively. Changing distros would not make any difference, either. – goldilocks Mar 20 '13 at 16:34
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    My netbook (Samsung N210, 2GiB RAM, Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450@1.66GHz) runs full Fedora 18 with no problem at all. Not exactly a gamer's system, and some stuff like compiling and LaTeXing largeish documents is a bit slow, granted; but it is my day-to-day work machine. What a "limited machine" is today would have been a supercomputer for Linus in '91. – vonbrand Mar 21 '13 at 12:24
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You could probably compile dpkg/apt on TinyCore, but then you'd have to package stuff on your own.

But really, you are optimizing the wrong thing here. The major factors that define memory usage are the applications you use; you could probably do with Debian + a minimal window manager (e.g. Openbox). It should be lightweight enough.

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apt equlent of tinycore is tce-load http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:package_management_cheat_sheet

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Try tce-load -wi gcc.tcz for installing gcc. tce-load is the package manager and wi means download and install. Have a look at the list of packages available over at the TCZ repository.

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