on Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 09:23:47PM +1200, cr (cr@orcon.net.nz) wrote:
> It'd be nice to have a self-contained floppy with just the basic
> componenets needed to boot a Linux system, so there's room to add a
> few utilties of ones choice. I've done that with my DOS floppy.
> But reading the HOWTOs, it seems that creating a Linux boot disk is a
> rather more complex procedure.
Trinux aims in this general direction. The basic boot system is 2-3
floppies, with the 2nd and later disks being used to add additional
utilities to the system.
Of course, if you start with a chroot install, you can use debootstrap
and add as many Debian utilities as you want ;-)
For most of us, a bootable CDROM is a more viable option. I don't know
if USB pen drives are bootable, but with 120-256 MiB RAM, these would be
sufficiently large to be quite useable systems. One issue here is the
number of read-write cycles the systems allow.
> I guess the workaround is to use one of the pre-made disks like tomsrtbt, and
> just put my own utilities on a floppy that I can mount afterwards. At
> least, unlike DOS-booted-from-a-floppy, I imagine the Linux rescue systems
> don't constantly nag you to "Insert disk with COMMAND.COM in Drive A:" or
> whatever the Linux equivalent would be ;)
No, you won't be prompted to insert disks, most (all, AFAIK) run in
RAMdisks. Running live from floppy is simply too slow.
This limits you to 16 RAMdisks of 4096 KiB each, however. The updated
romfs actually resizes dynamically if I understand correctly (and
probably don't).
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
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