Re: group of Java maintainers was Re: guavac, kaffe, kore, a free java development environment?
Bruce Perens <bruce@va.debian.org> wrote:
>I think it would be nice for us to eventually build a lightweight network
>computing client. This would be a _really_stripped_down_ system capable of
>network booting and executing a web browser and Java (not much more than a
>kernel, X server, browser, and java runtime), and a regular Debian system to
>be its server. It should network boot from one floppy (or ROM) and download
>X and the rest once it has booted. Use of font servers and other stuff
>intended to reduce or eliminate local storage would be nice.
FYI, something similar to this can already be done. I constructed
a floppy a few months ago containing (IIRC) syslinux, a kernel and a
ramdisk. There was enough room on one 1.44Meg floppy to include ash, some
scripts, all the tools needed to bring a SLIP link up, and the X server.
I used a shell script as init, and it seemed to work reasonably well!
All the fonts have to be stored elsewhere, of course, but I think this is
how X servers -should- be run (it also means the cursor doesn't ``stick''
every time the server rasterises a font).
(It also helped that the box I ran it on had bags of RAM installed,
so I didn't need a swap partition.)
If there's any interest, I'll try doing a package to generate this floppy.
Cheers,
--
Charles Briscoe-Smith
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