[SC.LUG] Damn!

[Dr A V Le Blanc]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 01:57:36PM +0000, David Holden wrote:
> You may be interested in this article
> 
> http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lwl1/?t=gr,lnxw04=LLP1
> 
> which describes one chaps approach to putting together a linux system to
> run on older hardware.

Actually I think his approach might be a bit harder than necessary.
Although it is certainly possible to build the system he describes,
it might be easier to use components from existing systems.  About
a year ago I put together a base system out of Debian components
that required 20mb of hard disk space.  Of course, this had no X,
no locales libraries but C (32mb), no zoneinfo for all the world
time zones (5mb), etc, and this required deleting files that I
didn't need.  But the system was based in principle on standard
Debian packages.  I have a much smaller system that I distribute
on a ramdisk on the machines I work with.  The gzipped ramdisk
takes up 3mb of disk space, and can be stored in a tiny partition
on the machine, or loaded over the network by Grub at boot time.
The actual ramdisk has 8mb of disk space, so requires a machine
with at least 16mb or more of memory, but that's not usually a
problem.  Most of the binaries on this system are standard
Debian; it lets me do networking and most system administration.
For special purposes it can download additional binaries over
the web; a script downloads the binaries to /tmp and executes
them, passing its arguments.  This allows me to update various
scripts and binaries without changing the ramdisk.  I've used
a variant on the ramdisk to make bootable CDs for backup purposes:
the CD contains a bootable system (the ramdisk) and tools for
reinstalling the machine and putting, say, 1gb or so of data
on it, all compressed on the CD; it includes scripts for repartitioning
and creating file systems.

     -- Owen
     LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk