From adavis@hayson.vmarketing.com Wed Mar 25 00:45:07 1998
From: adavis@hayson.vmarketing.com
To: users@lists.opensuse.org
Subject: Re: [S.u.S.E. Linux] The Linux Kernel Compiler Web Page
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 01:45:07 +0100
Message-ID: <6f9k2j$nk8$1@Galois.suse.de>
In-Reply-To: <[S.u.S.E. Linux] The Linux Kernel Compiler Web Page>
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On Tue, Mar 24, 1998 at 05:22:40PM -0500, zentara wrote:
>=20
> Andrew L. Davis wrote:
>=20
> > > zentara wrote:
> > > You can get linux running with only about 15 megs of space.
> > >
> > > If you are interested go to:
> > >     <A HREF=3D"http://gwyn.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/index.html">=
<A HREF=3D"http://gwyn.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/index.html</A">http://=
gwyn.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/index.html</A</A>>
> > >
> > > The one question I would like to toss out, is what is the bare minimum
> > > system needed to boot with NFS support?
> > >
> > > Besides the kernel, what configuration files are absolutely
> > > neccesary for linux to run? And what executables do you need?
> > > Of course bash, but what else?
> >=20
> > You can get Linux to boot off of a floppy and mount it's root partion over
> > NFS.  I do not know how fast this is but can really expand the number of
> > computers one can make useable.
> >=20
>=20
> You mean if you had floppy set up right, you could theoretically
> boot a win95 machine with it. Mount the root filesystem
> via NFS, on the dos partition, with UMSDOS built into the floppy
> kernel? =20
> Is this floppy creation basically the same as the "mini-how-to"
> on Boot Disks"? Or is there some special way to buid these floppies.
>=20
> I made a boot and root floppy with YAST, and the boot floppy
> could be mounted as a minix filesystem and looked at. But the
> root floppy was some unknown filesystem.
> How do they make it? Is it an image which is loaded into ramdisk?

What I think happens is that the boot image loads the kernal and then uses
bootp to find the nfs server then mounts the exported directory as / that is =

the root directory!  All that you need is a floppy, MB w/ CPU, case, network =

card, video, and memory!  No harddrive needed!

The root disk is basicaly gzipped so that you can, in theory, have a 3MB root
file system.  The Boot Disk HOWTO details how to do this; I would not call it=
=20
difficult, but definitely not for the faint of heart.


--=20
Andrew L. Davis					Network Operations
adavis(a)vprlnk.net				ViperLink International
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