Re: a study topic for advanced maintainers
> If one would transfer the root-system from the installation to be the
> initial root-system on the harddisk then you would have quite a bit of
> functionality already and saved a lot of space. That functionality could
> be used to bootstrap the rest of the packages.
The floppy root is probably not what you are looking for as far as tools
that should be transferred to the hard disk. Because it had to fit in
500K compressed to get on the same 1200K floppy as the kernel, it has had
every trick in the book performed on it to keep it small. Most of the
commands on it are not fully compatible with the "real" versions, and it
has a special (incompatible) libc.
You could get dpkg on that floppy, but you'd have to watch out for
installation methods that used perl. It would be a tight squeeze to get
the kernel+root+dpkg on a 1200K floppy.
I still think it makes more sense to mount something (CD, NFS, hard disk
with MSDOS filesystem, etc.) and extract a pre-prepared base archive. The
no-mount option is still available as long as you have enough RAM.
bruce>: Copy the basedisks.sh procedure, and run it on the hard disk when
bruce> installing the system. Make the result smaller, faster, and better
bruce> than the status quo.
> That is an interesting idea.
That is probably the cleanest way to do it other than by just extracting the
base with "tar". However, it suffers from the disadvantage that it is bigger
and slower than just installing the base
archive, and achieves the exact same result. The only advantage that you gain
is that if you have a writable medium you can change the packages that will be
installed without rebuilding the base archive.
Bruce
--
Bruce Perens, Pixar Animation Studios
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