[Blackpool] Saturday meeting

[MJ Hewitt]

Hi Colin,

The bootdisk project covers both compressed and uncompressed filesystems.
Compression is almost always used, but the document suggests that not using
compression is more straightforward, and possibly easier to understand.
However, no compression introduces the problem of finding smaller versions
of all the essential requirements, mingetty being just one, Donald has also
mentioned the other obvious one, the 'C' library. For this, there is
possibly, dietlibc, and ulibc.
The issue is how 'deep' do you want to go, we have already glossed over the
booting issue and lilo (linux loader) The kernel I suggested does not need
lilo, it uses 'magic numbers' compiled in, to boot itself and can recognise
and boot eiither type of filesystem.
Using lilo, or grub gives more flexibility at boot, just as a compressed
filesystem gives more flexibility, but it is swings and roundabouts in this
situation and down to you regarding the amount of effort you want to put in.

Mike




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Thanks for your email.  I've downloaded Mingetty & put it in .dev and am
ready to proceed.  I'm happy to look at Donald's kind suggestion of
compression if we've time but I'm not sure about Lilo.

However, Jon was going to look at Wine (for me - though I try not to
monopolise the sessions!) so it may have to wait.

You kindly brought in  a magazine last time with a bit about Arch in it.  If
you think it's a bad idea, fair enough, but before the mag gets lost, I
wondered if I could borrow it to photocopy the article and burn a copy of
Arch for future use when I'm a better Geek?  If I live long enough that is.

Finally (you'll be glad to hear) have you looked at Suse Studio?  I had a
brief look but it looks quite complex.

Very best wishes,

Colin

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-- 
Best regards,
Mike Hewitt

PC Recycler Ltd.
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