Home

Welcome to the basiclinux-lcars wiki!

BasicLinux-LCARS is a Linux LiveCD based on BasicLinux 3.5 and designed to boot on 386-class systems with as little as 3MB of RAM.

BasicLinux

BasicLinux is (was?) a Slackware-based Linux distribution which replaced the Slackware kernel and core utilities with a custom stripped-down kernel and a small BusyBox binary. The last release, BasicLinux 3.5, from around 2007, was based on Slackware 4.0 and shipped a 2.2.26 kernel with a BusyBox 1.01 binary. It was compatible with old libc5 and glibc-2.3.1 libraries. The compressed system root image could fit on a pair of 1.44MB floppy disks, and could be booted from an MS-DOS hard drive on any PC with at least a 386 and 3MB of RAM.

BasicLinux-LCARS

BasicLinux-LCARS originated as BasicLinux 3.5 packaged in such a way as to run from a CD-ROM.

While BasicLinux-LCARS extends BasicLinux versioning, it is an independent fork and unaffiliated with the original project. BL-LCARS v4 is not in any way an "official" version 4 of the original BasicLinux project.

v3.5.1

Versions 3.5.1-beta1rev1 to 3.5.1-beta1rev6 are based directly on BasicLinux 3.5, with modifications to the initrd, /etc/rc, startx, and profile scripts as well as the WM configuration files. They use the same kernel, utilities, libraries, etc as BL3.5, with rare exceptions:

• Tcl/Tk 8.6 (from vintage BL3 contribs)
• glibc-2.3.1 (from Slackware 9.0, though officially supported with BL3.5)
• A small selection of newly built contrib packages

v4.0.0

Versions 4.0.0 and up (including all beta-tagged versions) are still loosely based on BasicLinux 3.5, but with a new kernel, upgraded GCC, and some other updated utilities.