I took the approach of cutting an established distribution down to size rather than hand building or tweaking a custom distribution for several reasons. Primarily, one of the uses of Hello World Linux will be in an embedded medical device and the FDA has strict rules governing unexecuted and untested code. Binaries and libraries from established commercial distributions stand a much better chance of passing qualification trials with vastly more reasonable testing requirements. I also wanted to easily keep up with new kernel releases. I attempted to to use Tom Fawcett's YARD Perl scripts to automate the build, but couldn't get it to work-I suspect it has something to do with the automatic stripping of symbols. The scripts worked well, however, in eliminating unused libraries. I ended up hacking a directory listing into a shell script to cp files one at a time. I plan to use this script for building a 2.2 based small footprint version of Redhat and possibly Debian. I took great care to preserve the networking capabilities in the 4.3MB Redhat build, even to the point of keeping the sysvinit configuration and module loader stuff intact. I stopped at 4.3MB because I have an 8MB flash disk to work with, and I was reaching a point of diminishing returns. Even so, there's still room for someone to cut even more fat for a sub 4MB rev--the getty/PAM login libraries and bash are particularly juicy targets. I'd be glad to post the build script, the Hello World daemon code, and the gcc/Java/MSVC++ clients if someone could suggest a good place to put it all. Mark -----Original Message----- From: Bill Ewing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Mark Hatasaka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: ELKS List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wednesday, April 28, 1999 12:45 PM Subject: Re: Minimalizing Linux > (or more likely FLASH Disk instead of EPROM) Of course, 4.3 MB >won't fit on an 80186 (or 8088). > > Does this include networking? > > I personally like the idea of deriving ELKS from an existing >Linux distribution better than (debugging) all- (or even partly) new >code (but keep up the good work, Alistair!). This becomes more >worthwhile if you can automate the process (so it applies readily to >new Linux versions), and then provide options to easily include >feature "packages" (or is this already done?). Finally, it would be >great to have some of the great brains (e.g., on this list) look for >missing pieces (i.e., other things that can be removed / >modularized). > > --Bill > >
