Having vowed not to spend my 10-day winter vacation doing anything serious, I decided to play a bit with Linux, apart from reading the novel "She" by H. Rider Haggard (of Allan Quartermain fame) and revisiting the Beatles' album collection I got hold of just before setting off from college.
Anyhow, one of the first things I did when I got home was to strip off /everything/ from my ancient Ubuntu installation in the PC at my home, and essentially removed ALL the packages other than the important core and base and essential ones. This brought me down to the beautiful command line at the next reboot, and then I to do a little tweaking with the /etc/init.d/rc to display some messages and request for user login, instead of asking for root login (it was configured to spawn /sbin/sulogin, instead of login) and such. All this led to a cool "Back2Basics" Linux, which still takes around 800 MB because I haven't removed a LOT of unneccesary libraries incase I break something (I've done that once before). So I'll proceed to do the stripping work soon (hehe). I got hold of this O'Reilly book on Building Embedded Linux Systems sometime back and it lists this minimum required directory structure for the root (/) filesystem, and another book on Embedded Linux (whose publisher I cannot recall) which listed the bare essential binaries and the corresponding libraries required. So I'm planning to base the stripping-down on the guidelines in these books, and of course using the ldd command to find the dependencies of the desirable binaries incase I want something extra. I replaced the GNU utils with Busybox yesterday. My target is to just have the Kernel Image, Busybox, Perl, and Java. Lets see what comes of it. ;-)
Also, I'm working on a new categorized layout for this blog, something I'd developed two years back but never implemented. Its going to automatically pick the most popular categories and show posts filed under those in square boxes, and the more popular categories will be higher up in the boxed, 3-column layout.
Cheers
Shashank
Also, I'm working on a new categorized layout for this blog, something I'd developed two years back but never implemented. Its going to automatically pick the most popular categories and show posts filed under those in square boxes, and the more popular categories will be higher up in the boxed, 3-column layout.
Cheers
Shashank
1 comment:
well, I won't suggest stripping down an existing distribution which is not meant for the purpose and more to it, there is no actual output from the whole process in terms of knowledge gained(correct me if i am wrong), you also take a risk of breaking the system and then have to start over, ... .instead use something like LFS, or OpenEmbedded .... or go for a distribution such as http://ubuntulite.tuxfamily.org/,http://mulinux.dotsrc.org/,http://www.minimalinux.org/ttylinux/, .... you get to learn stuff while you are custom building the system !
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