Re: new distribution
On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 12:14:37PM -0800, trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com wrote:
> Thanks, I will google for them shortly. I had looked at
> pocketworkstation.org the 90M install was basically what I wanted to try
> to trim, replacing some stuff with busybox, and remove gcc and all on
> the base install and try to fit it into my iPAQ (48M storage, but the 2
> banks are killing me on dividing it ...). The goal is to make a debian
> distribution that will boot and all without the requirement of 1.
> familiar as a base (even for installing) and 2. pure debian.
>
> This appears to be smewhat difficult but I think that a core image can
> be shrunk enough and once you get in if you want/happen to have
> removable media (sd/cf/etc) you can then mount that and all (this is a
> particular problem with SD which you cant boot from and I dont like the
> 'load familiar pivot_root' option.)
I have strong doubts about this approach - once you start stripping it
down it's definitely not "pure debian" anymore, so I don't see the point
of doing it that way instead of using one of the existing "minimal"
installations that are designed to run in flash ROMs of around that size.
The point of a Debian install is that you can "apt-get" additional
packages from the standard Debian archives, and once you start doing that
you'll almost immediately pull in enough dependencies to require more
storage.
The "woody" pocketworkstation package had still fit into a 64MB
partition, but additional dependencies needed for the "sarge" build made
that impossible, the new minimum is around 120MB uncompressed.
Enabling the Debian package manager to support multiple install
partitions with relocatable system parts would be useful, but it's a
large amount of work, and I haven't heard if any of the previously
ongoing attempts to add this kind of thing have been successful.
Why don't you like the pivot_root option? Do you also object to booting a
kernel with modules in an "initrd" which would IMHO be similar? The end
result is that the booted system won't have any dependencies left on the
originally booted system. I can understand not liking the "chroot"
approach, but pivot_root is different. I'd consider it to be much less
hackish than a manually split and minimized pseudo-Debian (no offense
intended).
-Klaus
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