nym on Nostr: Building a tiny Linux from scratch Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from ...
Building a tiny Linux from scratch
https://blinry.org/tiny-linux/Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!
Here’s what it looked like:

Let me tell you how I got there.
I wanted to learn more about how the Linux kernel works, and what’s involved in booting it. So I set myself the goal to cobble together the bare neccessities required to boot into a working shell.
In the end, I had a tiny Linux system with a size of 2.5 MB, which I could boot from a USB stick on my laptop!
What you’ll get out of this article:
- A better understanding of what happens when your computer boots Linux.
- What terms like bzImage, initrd and UEFI mean.
- Ideas for how to deal with the problems that I encountered.
- And if you haven’t used Nix, it might be interesting to see how I used it to manage the tools and libraries I needed.

originally posted at
https://stacker.news/items/859535Published at
2025-01-22 01:47:18Event JSON
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"content": "Building a tiny Linux from scratch\nhttps://blinry.org/tiny-linux/\n\nLast week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!\n\nHere’s what it looked like:\n\n\n\nLet me tell you how I got there.\n\nI wanted to learn more about how the Linux kernel works, and what’s involved in booting it. So I set myself the goal to cobble together the bare neccessities required to boot into a working shell.\n\nIn the end, I had a tiny Linux system with a size of 2.5 MB, which I could boot from a USB stick on my laptop!\n\nWhat you’ll get out of this article:\n\n- A better understanding of what happens when your computer boots Linux.\n- What terms like bzImage, initrd and UEFI mean.\n- Ideas for how to deal with the problems that I encountered.\n- And if you haven’t used Nix, it might be interesting to see how I used it to manage the tools and libraries I needed.\n\n\n\noriginally posted at https://stacker.news/items/859535",
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