I'm looking to install an extremely light-weight flavour of linux on a USB stick. It also needs to be basically only CLI. Has anyone ever looked for something like this? Ever found something good?

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6 Answers

To be particularly minimal, you could roll your own. Fair warning: this is an endeavor of many hours, but you'll better appreciate what goes into getting your OS pieced together.

Linux From Scratch is a very actively maintained step-by-step guide on just that:

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Red Hat or Debian are probably what your looking for. You could also install Ubuntu as command line only.

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MicroCore is a command-line only variant of Tiny Core Linux.

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ttylinux is extremely lightweight and CLI only -- busybox utilities built off of uclib.

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Back in the day there was Linux On A Floppy (LOAF) and Tom's Root Boot. However I suspect they are too super light weight for USB drives :-)

Nowadays I suppose the equivalent is Damn Small Linux which will install onto a bootable USB flash stick.

Ubuntu Server might be what you are looking for. Because servers are usually headless, the basic setup does not contain any GUI parts.