Hi Mark,
You might want to take a quick look at ShareTheNet (www.sharethenet.com).
There is a commercial and a free version. It fits a ton of stuff on a
floppy by going the other direction -- hmm let's see what we actually need
to run a bare Linux system. Currently it works as a NAT router, but can
easily be changed to work as just about anything.
Regards,
John Lombardo
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Mark Hatasaka
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 1999 1:15 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: A "Hello World" Linux Distribution
I'm working on a "Hello World" minimum Linux distribution. As the name
implies, the goal of this distribution is to create and document the
smallest footprint Linux root file system that will support a TCP/IP server
daemon. The initial daemon does nothing but respond with an ASCII Hello
World message upon establishing a TCP connection. (I have simple clients in
gcc, Java and MSVC++).
HW Linux is intended to be a bedrock framework upon which any embedded Linux
project can be built (much as I admire LRP and Trinux, there is still too
much stuff included that will be left unexecuted in the projects I'm working
on).
I started with an 850MB Redhat 5.2 installation and through guess and by
golly whittled it down to 11MB. Of that, nearly 7MB is libraries. My next
step is to create a Bootdisk_Contents input file to Tom Fawcett's YARD PERL
scripts. YARD, by culling out unexecuted libraries, unnecessary binaries
and stripping debugging symbols, should significantly reduce the
distribution size. My goal is to create a root file system < 4MB when
executed natively off a hard drive or flash IDE drive and <= 1.7MB when
tarballed to execute out of a RAM drive.
Is there anyone out there interested in helping further HW Linux along?
I'll gladly contribute the root file system (such as it is), the daemon
code, the daemon start-up script, the clients, some basic documentation and
whatever YARD input files and documentation I create in the future. I
figure I'll need some FTP space and probably some Web space, help in setting
up the site, and help in creating YARD input files. Of course,
documentation and general advice on what further to cut from the root FS
will always be helpful, and will be posted on the site.
Another important use for the site would be to distribute information on
adding back functionality to Hello World Linux in a modular and controlled
manner. Also, the site can be used to distribute other variants of minimum
Linux distributions.
Hope this thing flies,
Mark
