Nate Drake grapples with the ultra-minimalist Peropesis. Will he relive Linux’s glory days, recover a corrupted system or have a breakdown?
Not to be confused with the capital of the First Persian Empire (that’s Persepolis), the developers of Peropesis (‘personal operating system’) say it is “small-scale, minimalist, command-line-based Linux”.
How small scale? This distro’s ISO weighs in at just 205MB and is designed to be run entirely in live mode. The helpful introductory manual on the Peropesis website says the distro is a good way to familiarise yourself with the command line, as well as programs commonly used in Linux.
It also points out that this system can be quickly booted in live mode and is compatible with UEFI and BIOS motherboards. That makes Peropesis perfect for mounting hard drives of faulty systems.
A cynic might argue you could do exactly the same by live-booting the latest version of Ubuntu via the terminal and enjoy a quick game of Mines on the desktop as your drives are being rebuilt.
Still, Peropesis has a certain charm. It’s entirely distribution-independent, having been written from scratch with open source code. It’s also the one and only Lithuanian Linux distro we’ve reviewed to date. The online manual makes it far less daunting than other command-line-only distros we’ve encountered.
Your first hurdle involves simply entering the root username to log in – no password required.
After this you can navigate the file structure or run one of the few built-in apps. Peropesis includes the Links text-only web browser for visiting web pages. Sadly, this isn’t to be confused with the Links2 or Lynx browsers, which have limited image support via X11, but it’s surprisingly easy to navigate pages via text only.
Making good on the earlier claim, the manual also covers how to use Peropesis to mount an external USB drive and use chroot to recover a faulty Linux OS.
On login, you may also notice the message saying ‘No New Mail’. This is thanks to the S-nail mail client. As this again can only be accessed via the command line, you need to edit the ~/.mailrc yourself to add your credentials. Peropesis supports t
