Just a suggestion, but it may be well worth Zonbu’s time to send a free unit or two (with Australian power adapters, if available) to Barry Kauler, the lead developer of PuppyLinux.
I have a feeling this could be an excellent test platform for his work, and he continues to aggressively put out new releases with great innovation and very tiny resource requirements…
Building from scratch he optimizes heavily for older hardware and provides very lightweight applications. His whole operating system is less than 100MB.
Despite the, um, visually unique logo, the project is impressive.
In fact, I think he’d be an amazing staff resource.
Of course I have no idea if he is available or even interested in such a thing, but I’d definitely get a unit in his hands…
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 
Same would be true for Slax, I think I tried PuppyLinux after you wrote about it but ended up with Slax on a newly bought 8 gb Corsair Flash Voyager GT which makes it really fast to load everything into ram as you suggested would be made with Zonbu in that blog post 😉
Both PuppyLinux, Slax and Zonbu are truly interesting projects working in the same spirit and some colaboration betweenthem would certainly be nice to see 🙂
I agree with the Puppy recommendation. I’ve been running Puppy for a couple of years in different configurations on different PCs and I find it to be impressive, and immediately thought of it as an option to run on the Zonbu hardware.
Tried puppy on zonbu. It runs fine. The issues are the audio and 3d video drivers.
If someone could tackle that and publish as a puppy/zonbu distro that would be great.
Left a post on their forums to that effect but there seems to be little interest.
Looks like someone posted on their forums about it too
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=21554
The flexibility of gentoo’s design allows it to run on more platforms than any other distros, which is probably why it was chosen as zonbu’s OS. Another advantage of its flexibility is that whatever you can do in any other distro, you can most likely accmoplish in gentoo. Here’s a guide on how to load gentoo into your ram: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-296892.html
As was mentioned already, it’s just the drivers that need fine-tuning for Zonbu. Puppy Linux is 100% right for Zonbu, in fact, Zonbu is “over-powered” for Puppy Linux.
What Zonbu enthusiasts can do now is to post specific questions under that Zonbu thread:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=21554
The minipup group has some experience in customizing Puppy for hardware, and you may want to propose a project for the group, see http://minipup.info .
Cheers!
Just another note on lightweight OS… How about 5mb? 😉 http://gentoo-wiki.com/TinyGentoo You can see why gentoo is the favorite distro for most developers, especially on non-standard platforms like zonbu.
[…] to load Zonbu OS in to RAM Commenting on our recent Puppy Linux post, reader gtuser recently shared a link to a highly detailed (if complex) post on one of the Gentoo discussion forums that details how to […]
just today, Bogdan Radulescu, creator of Nimblex, pointed out to me in this exchange that most any liveCD Linux can be be booted in RAM.
i’m a big fan of Puppy Linux (using myPup to write this), BTW. Puppy on the Zonbu hardware would seem a natural.