Interesting Useful Commands from "DietPi" distro

General Discussions
1

Discussing Linux distributions is always a risk, but while checking out what is “DietPi” OS, I discovered the following interesting commands:

Stat Command
Disk usage findmnt -no USED / # + /boot + /boot/efi + /boot/firmware
RAM usage free -th | mawk '/^Total:/{print $3}'
Pre-installed packages dpkg --get-selections | wc -l
Running processes echo $(( $(pstree -Ta | wc -l) - 3 ))
Boot duration systemd-analyze | mawk '{print $(NF-1)" "$NF;exit}'


DietPi vs Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit)

Bookworm on Raspberry Pi Zero W at 2024-05-23
Stat DietPi DietPi/Raspberry Pi OS [%] Raspberry Pi OS
RAM usage 32 MiB 36% 90 MiB
Running processes 9 43% 21
Disk usage 667 MiB 30% 2206 MiB
Pre-installed packages 223 36% 612
Boot duration 22.405s 49% 45.650s
Temporary files RAM disk (tmpfs) rootfs
Log files RAM disk (tmpfs) rootfs
SSH pre-installed Yes edit required
Download size 209 MiB 44% 474 MiB
Image size 896 MiB 37% 2424 MiB
Build date 2024-05-13 2024-03-15

DietPi vs Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit)

Bookworm on Raspberry Pi 5 at 2024-05-25
Stat DietPi DietPi/Raspberry Pi OS [%] Raspberry Pi OS
RAM usage 118 MiB 67% 177 MiB
Running processes 9 41% 22
Disk usage 882 MiB 40% 2197 MiB
Pre-installed packages 255 43% 596
Boot duration 6.220s 46% 13.497s
Temporary files RAM disk (tmpfs) rootfs
Log files RAM disk (tmpfs) rootfs
SSH pre-installed Yes edit required
Download size 178 MiB 43% 414 MiB
Image size 1024 MiB 39% 2640 MiB
Build date 2024-05-13 2024-03-15

I am pretty sure none of the Dexter/ModRobotics APIs will install on DietPi, but the statistic gathering commands are interesting examples of command line tools available.

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2

Interesting!

It would be interesting to try to install them and see what’s missing and what the resultant size would be.

Does it include a desktop or it strictly text based?

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3

No idea - When I understood it to be another “minimum distro” I knew enough that it is not easily compatible with any of my GoPiGo3 use cases.

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4

Quite possibly.

Other “tiny” distros include a very lightweight desktop.  Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux[1], and a few others I don’t remember all have desktops, but my money’s on it not being compatible with just about every graphical app out there.

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  1. Damn Small Linux was originally designed to fit on a 1.44 meg floppy, but as the kernel and necessary utilities got larger it was re-branded as a “credit-card” sized distribution.  I haven’t seen it in a while, so I have no idea what it’s doing, or if it even still exists.
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