[luau] Demo Linux PC

[MonMotha]

TB wrote:
>>whether it is possible to squeeze a 
>>modified, but almost full-featured, RH distro into a
> 
> 256 MB flash 
> 
>>disk.
> 
> 
> 256 is pretty tight. lnx-bbc is around 50 MB on a
> bizcard cd, but it has no gui, mostly just rescue
> tools. I guess you could build on that. What sort of
> demo?
> 
> I doubt RH is the place to start - maybe knoppix, or
> Eagle Linux, or Linux From Scratch. Knoppix squeezes a
> lot of nice workstation functionality into a 700 MB CD
> (including GUI, of course).
> 
> Or just use knoppix on a CD - is the flash disk really
> a hard requirement or just for fun? I assume you'll
> use a floppy to boot?
> 
> TB

256MB tight!  Hah!

I've got a networking based system in 11MB (and that's using glibc, using uClibc 
can save you another meg or so).  TinyX is pretty, well, tiny. (Oh, and for the 
record, I've got a similar, albeit more limited in the way of remote admin as it 
lacks even a telnet daemon, "distribution" that fits in about 900k, yes, that's 
900k + a kernel).

All told, you can fit a surprisingly complete system into about 32MB, but don't 
expect to use redhat as your base for it.

CDs aren't really practical if you desire to be able to save things.  You can 
actually boot off CF cards in IDE<->CF converters (that's what we were using for 
this router before we went with single board computers) as if they were hard 
drives (I use lilo).  This also allows you to have a normal readwrite filesystem.

The biggest problem you'll have is getting some of your favorite software in. 
256MB is pretty generous for this, but GNOME/KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. are 
all VERY large.  If you're willing to stick to things like Phoenix/Firebird, and 
apps that don't need GNOME, but only GTK, you should be able to make it fit with 
room to spare.

--MonMotha