[plug] Floppy based Mini-Distro's

[Jay Turner]

> On Behalf Of Sham Chukoury
> Sent: Saturday, 12 June 2004 4:53 AM

> > 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.
>
> I second that. ;) Useful resources and tips:
> - reverse engineer the debian installation boot and root floppy images
> - check out slackware's installation floppy's init/boot script (nice and
> simple)

I was considering doing this for the Red Hat boot floppy.
Right now I am using the Red Hat 9 boot CD, running up the installer in text
mode
and then on the first install screen moving to Alt-F2 console window and
'dding'
in there...

It's a little bit cumbersome for ordinary users. My next thought was to use
the Red Hat boot floppy,
but without the install media somewhere (CD, FTP etc..) you can't get to the
second stage loader i assume which
is when a console becomes available.. so that ruled that out.

Hence my requirement for a small floppy based distro that has bash (or more
specifically can support the fairly standard elements I have used in my
script ('[' 'echo' 'do' 'while' etc..) and dd available to me.
If you know of a floppy distro that can do that, let me know :-)

If all else fails, I'll continue using the Red Hat 9 CD.

Thanks again to all