[plug] Floppy based Mini-Distro's

[Brad Campbell]

Jay Turner wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a good floppy based distro?
> Why?
> 
> I really need the linux equivalent of a DOS boot disk that will boot into a
> command prompt (shell)
> and give me access to a limited range of sh tools (to ultimately run my
> previously discussed "dotted" dd script).
> 
> There is a list here
> http://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=links#floppy
> 
> But I was hoping y'all could save me some time and point me to the better
> ones.

Want some real fun, and a great way to learn a bit more depth about linux in general?
Build your own from scratch.

Use a 2.4 kernel
http://www.uclibc.org
http://www.busybox.net

Then go to town. Busybox contains almost everything you need for a basic rescue disk now. Combine 
that with e2fs tools and other tools of your choice, then spend 100's of hours learning how to put 
it all together and optimise it to get it onto a 1.44 floppy along with the kernel.

My latest effort was for my father to backup his laptop onto an external firewire drive, so it 
needed pcmcia, ieee1394 drivers, custom scripts to set undocumented registers on the cardbus bridge 
(setpci and friends) and a copy of rsync, plus a single backup script so he can just boot the 
machine and type "backup". It mounts the NTFS drive, discovers the firewire drive, checks a few 
bits'n'bobs and then updates the backup with rsync. Fun for the whole family!

With little effort I managed to get the whole thing onto a single disk with about 100k to spare.

Make it easy on yourself and use syslinux on the floppy to load the initrd and kernel.

Now all jokes aside, it's only fun if you have 2 machines. I spent years tweaking the boot image and 
then rebooting the machine to test it, then having to boot back into linux to modify the image.
2 machines makes life so much more fun. It's not that hard, there is a lot of good info out there. I 
learned how to do it by grabbing LRP and pulling it apart to see what makes it tick.

I now have a shell script that compiles up all my stuff for me, compresses it all up and creates the 
image, then puts it on a floppy. If your interested I put it here : http://www.wasp.net.au/~brad/e 
for you to take a look at. My embeded development tree runs to about 70MB uncompressed and contains 
all the source I use to make these disks (Plus whole embeded distributions that boot from CF and run 
from ramdisk). The uClibc and busybox stuff is about 12 months out of date (I changed jobs about 9 
months ago and have not really done much with it since) but it should not be too hard to modify to 
make it work.

It's fun when you really get into it. And the busybox ash shell is pretty close to bash compatible.

Regards,
Brad