Re: Questions regarding the base system
> I think creating a user in the is not useful at all. Some package should
> later install a user upon configuration.
It's nice to have the root mail directed to the proper place as soon as
the system is activated, since many daemons send mail. It would be fine
to write a small C or shell program to perform this operation if Perl is
too much. However, please don't delete this feature.
***We also need Perl for dpkg-ftp, unless we rewrite _that_ in C***
> If possible I would like the base system to be that small that it can be
> included on the root system. I can make the root system about 2 Megabytes
> big I guess if loading is performed by loadlin.
This is solely limited by the memory in your computer. I don't think it's
practical to make the base much smaller than it is now (4+MB compressed),
but you can have that be part of the root system if you have 10MB RAM. For
smaller systems, we should continue to mount a disk and read the base from
it. 4MB systems can barely boot right now without a swap partition - 2MB
more in the ramdisk will not work for them.
> Could we perhaps set up a bootstrapping base? There should be a minimal
> base installed whose only purpose it is to access some archive on a CD /
> Harddisk or network and then it should install step by step more
> functionality.
This is what the floppy root does. Rather than transfer the floppy root to
the hard disk, it makes more sense for the floppy root to transfer the base
archive, whatever size it is, to the hard disk. This means that the floppy
root should be able to load the base from a CD, a hard disk, floppies, or
over the network and read it to the hard disk. Note that the Unix tools
on the floppy are not the normal ones - they are tiny ones that I wrote,
and the libc on the floppy is chopped down to contain only what those tools
need.
The current base is just enough to get the user logged in, to make it
possible for packages to install, and to get dselect running over the
network.
Thanks
Bruce
--
Bruce Perens, Pixar Animation Studios
*** "Toy Story" video tape in U.S. stores October 30 ***
Worldwide box office total for "Toy Story": $353,275,005
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