[plug] Installing Debian

[Simon Scott (SSC)]

Thanks for that

A friend has a small project to setup some P90s for a small school which
teaches underpriveleged kids (or something, didnt get the details). He was
talking about making a minimal install of linux, and wanted to know just how
small he could get it.

I suppose with a server which is half decent he could get away with a local
swap.

Altho Im still not sure P90s will run KDE 2 at any great rate of knots :)
But if they really want to teach kids about 'computing' rather than MS I
guess Linux is the way to go.

-----Original Message-----
From: The Thought Assassin [mailto:assassin at live.wasp.net.au]
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 12:28 PM
To: 'plug at plug.linux.org.au'
Subject: RE: [plug] Installing Debian


On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Simon Scott (SSC) wrote:
> This touches on an interesting topic that maybe you should keep in mind.
> When you have 2 or more different distros installed on one machine, you
dont
> need a distinct set of partitions for each.
> For example, as you have found out you *need* to share a /boot partition
> otherwise lilo coughs up.

To be more precise, the distro from which you run LILO, needs to be able
to see all of the boot information for both distros. A shared /boot
partition can be a good way of achieving this, but not the only way.

> You can also share swap partitions I believe, and obviously you would want
> to share /home

You can also share /tmp if that is a partition.

> Just out of interests sake, obviously I would need read/write access to
> /home and /var, but would it work if I mounted all the other partitions as
> read only?

You need to be able to write /tmp, but that can be a RAMdisk.

> Im thinking it would be a good idea to leave everything possible
> read only unless installing new software, at which point you could remount
> read/write.

You are thinking right, from a security and reliability POV. On the other
hand, you might find it a nuisance in practise, and unfortunately, there
is a lot of broken software out there that will violate your assumptions.

> This is also interesting from the perspective of running a thin-ish client
> with the major partitions mounted via NFS. You would only really need
> /boot and /var on the client I believe?

If that. /var can be non-local or volatile. (but not shared)
/boot is necessarily local, if you have a /boot. Otherwise you can boot
from the network and dispense with local disks altogether. (still a good
idea to have a local swap partition, though, and some things might be
worth storing or caching locally for speed reasons)

Most of these decisions depend on what you want out of your embedded
system, and how close to vanilla you need to keep your userland.

-Greg

**********************************************************************
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and 
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they   
are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify 
the system manager.

This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by 
MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses.

www.mimesweeper.com
**********************************************************************