>>>>> "Jean-Philippe" == Jean-Philippe Villeneuve <jeepii@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Jean-Philippe> I want to fit linux into a 64 Megs ata chip, so there is no
Jean-Philippe> moving part, and fit the actual setup that run a dos
Jean-Philippe> software.
...
Jean-Philippe> witch one is hte best for you??? and where can I find
Jean-Philippe> information on how to do it???
Although it would probably be better to start with a distro designed
specifically for a small footprint, I took a minimal 7.x installation, and
was able to trim it down to about 110MB for a firewall/DNS/DHCP/NTP box.
My goal was to get it to the point where I could fit it on a 128MB
CompactFlash, but I ran out of time to work on it, so the box ended up with
a 1GB laptop drive with a *lot* of free space... :-)
The "tricks" I used (if you could call them "tricks") were:
o Install Red Hat Linux normally, and use this test installation to
figure out the dependencies. I'd basically rpm -e whatever I knew I
wouldn't need and, if I hit upon a dependency-related problem, I'd
check to see if the packages depending on this package could also be
deleted. When I finally got to the point where I could go no
further, I had a list of the RPMs that were absolutely necessary.
o Taking this list of RPMs, I then used RPM to install everything into
a directory as a pseudo system root. Before doing this, I used RPM's
--initdb option to create a new RPM database for these packages (and
pointed at this database while installing the RPMs. I also used
--excludedocs during the installation to get rid of all the stuff in
/usr/share/doc.
o At this point, it's mainly a matter of doing whatever
configuration-related changes you want, setting up a bootloader, and
getting the resulting stuff on the correct media. This was about the
point that I ran out of time, so my "pseudo system root" ended up
being a small partition on my test hard drive that I then booted off
of... :-)
I think that's about it -- oh yeah, I had to do some ugliness with glibc
post-install to free up all the space used by the various timezone files,
but that was about it.
Oh, and if you are an Emacs user, check out zile for a very simple, *very*
small Emacs-like editor for your tiny system... :-)
Hope this helps,
Ed
--
Ed Bailey Red Hat, Inc. http://www.redhat.com/
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