Kwan Lowe wrote:
>
> The Linux from Scratch (www.linuxfromscratch.org) site is a good
> place to start. There's also a HOWTO for low memory systems. Much of
> it is out-of-date, but it has some useful guidelines nonetheless.
LFS looks like a excellent place to start
> This page has some useful links:
> http://users.aol.com/jkaplenk/linux/minimal.html
> Some links are dead, unfortunately.
> This link has some information on creating a "live CD" a la Knoppix.
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7233
>
> It worked for me and allowed me to build a rescue disk specific to my
> laptop.
These are all good, I had seen the last one but the other two I missed,
> Check out the sites for embedded systems. They are much smaller than
> many complete distros that claim to be slim. If you look at the
> "Busybox" site (search Google) you'll also find lots of information
> on creating minimal distros.
The floppy I am presently using uses a limited version of busybox, and
I will probably go that route, though I think that most of the HD's
that are out there have at least a 500M HD on them.
> A "distro" might not be what you need for such a system. I'd suggest
> starting with something like a rescue environment such as Tom's Root
> Boot and then customizing it to your needs. Unfortunately, modern
> kernels will almost certainly not fit on a floppy so you'd likely
> need to use a 2.2 or even 2.0 kernel. Yes, 2.4 can fit, but it might
> be close to useful for many machines.
Since I am really targeting hard drives I am not too worried about the
kernel as long as it will load on the HD and run. I will indeed look
at working on the present floppy because it fills a need for the guy
who wants to try to put up a simple switch to test and has a old box
over in the corner that has a couple of serial ports (one for the local
LAN and the other for the trunk out of the site) and wants to try it
without having to deal with the HD until he is sure he wants to take
on the full project.
Kwan, indeed you are correct as to the distro thing, the more I look
at LFS the more I see that this is probably going to be a hunt and
pick build.
To all that have replied so far, thank you very much, I will be
bothering you again soon, but at some point we will have this whole
thing changed over and then perhaps I can give a demo at one of the
meetings of how the network operates.
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