[Rule-list] Potential low mem boot disk/installer

[Devon]

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Hi all,
I've been working trying to create a small boot disk with the tools 
needed for a basic install. I think I may _almost_ have it.

I compiled busybox, fdisk, mke2fs, etc. against uClibc, 
http://www.uclibc.org/uClibc.html
and linked statically where possible. (If there is a way to force mke2fs 
to link statically, I haven't found it. It accepts the -static flag, but 
creates a dynamically linked executable anyway.) This makes for some very 
small executables. I have it working now, it boots, allows you to 
partition, make file systems, make swap, and turn on the swap space. 

I'm working on a script to use rpm2cpio to force the packages into place 
without actually using rpm. However, the busybox shell doesn't seem to 
understand some basic scripting commands. I'm looking for a small shell 
to include. At present, without attempting to format the floppy for a 
larger size, I have about 195k space left on the disk.

Any thoughts or comments on this idea? It won't be as user friendly as 
anaconda, but it should work in 8M without any difficulty at all.

I'll try to make a boot image available a little later if I can get the 
shell working better.

- -D

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pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/pgpkey.txt

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