How I built my own minimal Linux using Debian
How I built my own minimal Linux using Debian
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-i-built-my-own-tiny-linux-distro-using-debian/
Publish Date: 2026-02-12 11:30:00
Source Domain: www.howtogeek.com
When I was writing an article on tiny Linux distros, I needed one to try out. Instead of having to hunt for one, the best solution I thought would be one that I already had.
Why make my own tiny Linux?
While there are a lot of tiny Linux distros that I’ve enjoyed playing around with, Debian and Ubuntu are my primary distros. A lot of these distros use different package managers and installers than the ones I would prefer.
Debian-style distros have been familiar to me since before I started using Linux seriously. The first distro I’d ever tried was Knoppix, one of the first live distros. I’d become familiar with APT through the Fink package manager, which I’d encountered when using the Terminal on macOS (this was long enough ago that it was still called Mac OS X).
For a recent piece on tiny Linux distros I was working on, I thought that I’d rather not reinvent the wheel. I’ll just create my own tiny Linux out of an existing system. That would be Debian.
Installing Debian
I didn’t have to look far. In setting up a virtual machine, I could just use one of the “netinst” or “net installation” images I had lying around in my downloads folder. While it wasn’t exactly the latest version, that wouldn’t matter as much to me.
With a Debian netinst image, the latest packages are automatically pulled down from a mirror that you select in the installation program. This was…
