Re: new distribution
On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 01:17:25PM -0800, trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com wrote:
> 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?
That's basically what the familiar, opie, OpenEmbedded, etc.
distributions are aimed at, using ipkg which is somewhat dpkg compatible.
I haven't used them in a long time (in fact I haven't even used my C750
in months) so I can't comment on them.
> (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) ...
You can have an extremely small boot loader in the flash ROM (kernel,
shell, a handful of tools to get the SD module loaded), then pivot_root.
That will leave the rest of flash available for document storage. It can
also be kind of useful to have a bootable Linux system independently from
the SD for data recovery etc.
> > 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,
Neither the "base" nor the "big" package have GCC, you may have
misinterpreted the "gcc-*-base" packages which are very small (especially
after the optional step of deleting documentation) and just needed
to satisfy dependencies. They don't contain the compiler.
You could get the "base" packag smaller again with some hacking, there's
a fairly weird dependency chain which pulls in all perl modules if you
install "xlibs" even though it's most likely not needed:
xlibs => libxft1 => libfontconfig1 => fontconfig
=> defoma => perl => perl-modules
> 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.
... see above, that's what you get with a pivot_root. There will be a
couple of MB of duplication though, but it's for a good cause.
> 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 :)
AFAIK you can't use 2.6 with SD cards since there is no open source
driver and the closed-source driver module won't work.
> > 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 think people do partition disks, but along fairly clear usage lines
(such as / vs /var) and not with a minimal but functional system on one
partition and the rest on a different device. That breaks lots of
assumptions made by dpkg.
> 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 consider wasting a couple of MB a fair tradeoff versus having to spend
several weeks of development and administration effort needed to work out
a solution which may actually work less well in the end, but you're
welcome to make your own choice on priorities of course ;-)
-Klaus
Reply to: