Contributed by jose on from the ramdisk dept.
"I just bought these Company cards from Verbatim. These are CD-Rs that have a capacity of 30MB.I haven't seen much data on building ramdisk systems for the general masses. Anyone want to share a recipe, a la PicoBSD ? How about a system that lets you boot almost anywhere (boot time config)? Even better, some of the better tools to carry around? I saw a lot of Linux systems do this, why hasn't someone made a popular OpenBSD system like this?
I am wondering whether it is possible to build a BSD system a la Linux-BB that boots from the business card. Any ideas?"
(Comments are closed)
By SKULL () on
little disks. (San Diego beats Las Vegas by far btw).
Maybe Peter Hessler's openbsd-firewall-on-a-floppy
thing is close?
http://www.theapt.org/openbsd/firewall.html
By RC () on
Personally, I wouldn't bother. The generic boot floppy has always worked for repairs, and I find the whole "distro on a CD" idea to be a complete waste... Just some geeky thing for showing off... Like a webserver on a toaster.
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By Anonymous Coward () on
> Like a webserver on a toaster.
"Why not?"
http://bsdmall.com/netwhyntshir.html
(sorry, could not resist :)
By Anonymous Coward () on
Another use was to use the tape drive on a windows box for some network backups using dump.
By Jedi/Sector One () j@pureftpd.org on http://www.pureftpd.org/
http://www.microbsd.net/
By Pooh () pooh@gnome.ca on mailto:pooh@gnome.ca
- Remove all IPv6 related code (in fact, I just #ifdef INET6) and removed all userspace apps concerning IPv6.
- Build everything shared (LDSTATIC=''), only /usr/libexec/ld.so.elf was builded static.
- Removed all YP/NIS, KRB[45], SKEY, IPSec/ISAKMP apps/code (again #ifdef [something])
- All man pages stored in /usr/share/man/man* in .bz2 format and man config adapted for that. /usr/share/man/cat* removed (man is slower, no preformated result).
- /usr/share/[doc,misc] cleaned
- many other things I don't remember anymore
Everything fitted into less than 50Mb for NetBSD/macppc, including GCC (but I removed C++ support). Take in count that for i386 arch, binaries are 10-25% smaller than on PPC.
If this isn't enough, use crunch binaries (look crunchgen man page). Like /sbin/init could contain many apps used at boot-time, but not in multi-user. Crunch binaries are smaller than total of all single binaries size.
You could included everything into a MD ramdisk built-in the kernel. I expect it to be less than 30Mb easy.
And the kernel could be stored in .gz format, the loader will ungzip it before running.
A impressive NetBSD system could be built: with a good number of console apps (mutt, links) included with it, that will fit on your card.
I tried to do the same thing with OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but all IPv6 references, YP/NIS, etc are more tight into the code than NetBSD, I didn't manage to do the same thing. It need too much changes in code.
I may still had the code somewhere, but not sure. And I never took the courage to submit my changes to NetBSD.org).
By Anonymous Coward () on
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By Anonymous Coward () on
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By Anonymous Coward () on
By Anonymous Coward () on
By Anonymous Coward () on
Of course you lose everything when you reboot, but sometimes you just want the right tool for the job.
If the official CD came with the install kernel and a run-from-ramdisk kernel, I promise I would buy (of have work buy) 10 copies of each release. It would be that useful.
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By Anonymous Coward () on
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By Anonymous Coward () on
How do we make a ramdisk? How do we munge the kernel of our choice together with the root filesystem image of our choice, and put them on a CDROM correctly? This is something crying out for a tutorial/howto document.
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By francisco () on http://www.blackant.net/
search misc@: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&s=ramdisk+bootable+cd
read through how the RAMDISK* kernels are made, read rd(4).
By _azure () on
By Anonymous Coward () on
> copies of each release. It would be that useful.
Or, maybe, you're lying your ass off, trying to convince someone else to put some work into that project, so you can just leech it off of FTP, and not actually pay a cent.
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By Anonymous Coward () on
OpenBSD 2.3 - 1 copy
OpenBSD 2.4 - 3 copies
OpenBSD 2.5 - 5 copies
OpenBSD 2.6 - 8 copies
OpenBSD 2.7 - 10 copies
OpenBSD 2.8 - 10 copies
OpenBSD 2.9 - 10 copies
OpenBSD 3.0 - 12 copies
OpenBSD 3.1 - 10 copies (budget cuts and all)
See, it is easy to buy loads of copies when they are inexpensive compared to other operating systems. My boss likes it that it works, I get to support the project. What do you do? Buy every other one? Or leech?
By Tim () tim@night-shade.org.uk on mailto:tim@night-shade.org.uk
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By RC () on