On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 14:30 -0600, Klaus Weidner wrote: > 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. > I couldnt find any that are that way, it would be far easier for me to just download something and be done with it rather than make my own. I know that it would break true debian becuase a lot of the tools would be replaced by busybox (which isnt always as comptable, re mount and loop devices).. Can you suggest something that is minimal? > 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. > Yes, and that option is left open. The main goal of this is for my personal system, if someone else wanted it then fine. The problem that I am having is that familiar is somewhat broken and for months problems with their packages have been ignored (over 6 months) so I did not want to rely on that as a basis for the system. I also saw it as a waste of my flash storage to have familiar on there when I wasnt going to use it (I plan on using my 1GB SD card for much of the installation, but as of yet I havent discovered a boot loader that will let me boot off SD, LAB has aparently not progressed much in recent times according to one of the devleopers - not advised unless you have a JTAG cable) ... > 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. Well your minimal had stuff like gcc which isnt required, one of the things I was willing to give up to have a core in flash, and the rest would be stored elsewhere. The reason I wanted to do it this way was so that if the SD fails I still have a somewhat usable system. Until the SD drivers stablize a little I didnt want to commit to all or nothing. And with the latest handhelds.org release they got worse ... After trying to fix one problem I was having I was thinking about checking the status of the 2.6 series (I feel that would fix several other issues I am having, specifically with POSIX compliance) and possibly porting the drivers for my device to 2.6, if nothing else I get to use mine :) > 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). > Well I wasnt planning on it being split just different partitions, the type of thing that admins did back when I was starting out (now most it seem just make 1 large partition and toss everything in there, lazy? big cheap disks? that is how everyone else did it? whatever the reason nost dont seem to partition disks anymore).. I dont like the pivot_root concept becuase it relies on something being on my flash that is no longer used, which seems a waste of space. I had though of initrd as a solution at one point, however not last night when I decided to look into this approach. I could blame it on the fact that I have been up for way too long, but that would just be an excuse.. And I agree that it would be a minimized pseudo-Debian, but that still appeared better than the other options were. I will rethink initrd now, becuase as I write this rather long email I am thinking that I could make an easier solution that way. At least for now. -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com
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