![](https://seccdn.libravatar.org/avatar/a7cbc73b65db3e9a9c132e6c88b07157.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Tue, Mar 24, 1998 at 05:22:40PM -0500, zentara wrote:
Andrew L. Davis wrote:
zentara wrote: You can get linux running with only about 15 megs of space.
If you are interested go to: <A HREF="http://gwyn.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/index.html"><A HREF="http://gwyn.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/index.html</A">http://gwyn.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/index.html
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?
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.
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? 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.
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 difficult, but definitely not for the faint of heart. -- Andrew L. Davis Network Operations adavis@vprlnk.net ViperLink International -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e