How to build a Minimum Linux
 

I need to build a small linux for reimaging computers (Windows). It must have ability to get ip from dhcp and mount a windows network drive to pull the image off network drive. I want to get as small as possible. Please help!

how much linux experience do you have??

I have rebuilt kernel many times before and rebuilt DSL Linux that boots off USB key.

I am not sure how to remove things (like GUI) that I don't need for the small Linux.

what size do you need it to be?? will it be for use on a USB key??

also, double-posting is a NO NO on this site:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=318190

Okay, since I don't know how to remove it, I changed to something else.

I need the boot disk as small as possible. Maybe 2-5MB. If it will be a little bigger, that would be fine.

I have tried this: http://www.xs4all.nl/~lennartb/rescuedisk/node3.html
but the configration in Building uClibc doesn't match what I have.

Re: How to build a Minimum Linux
 

If you have time and patience try Linux from Scratch.
In the introduction of the LFS book the author states that he has build a 8MB linux web server.
If you compile only the things you really need you can build a really small linux.
If you don't have patience and time, you may try Damn Small Linux.. It's about 50MB and has X-windows (fluxbox). I cannot recall if samba is installed in DSL but you can easily find it out.
Anyway, you have many different options

*EDIT*
Opps! I just noticed that this thread is in the LFS forum. Sorry. I should be more careful

Hi
Firstly i dont recommend you use linux from scratch to build a very small distro, its simply not suitable for this. However in building lfs you may learn something (a lot) about how to go about building your small installation. I say this because lfs does not contain the kind of packages you'll need to use, for a start glibc is much too large for your purposes and many of the binaries would be better replaced by using a busybox alternative. Sure you can strip it down but in terms of effort it would make more sense to build from scratch your own system, that way you choose everything that goes in and you understand the build process better. If you want to try theres a few hints on stripping down and building a small lfs at the lfs site.

The build techniques and the version info of the toolchain packages will be most useful to you, take a look at hlfs, the toolchain uses the uclibc library. Apart from that take a look at from power up to bash prompt, its over at tldp and perhaps some texts on embedded systems.

Just to give you an idea of size i once made a lfs (compiled to optimise for size), without texinfo,kbd (but keyboard map compiled in kernel), wihout documentation, compressed man pages and without locales. I probably deleted some other stuff but not much. After stripping it weighed in at 182mb.

Good luck in what you want to do

Try ttylinux on http://www.minimalinux.org/
I do some work on the site there, and have tried ttylinux briefly, but couldn't tell you if it can do all the things you want. It's small though. It comes with networking support.

busybox and uclibc is perfect for minimal Linux :)

Linux From Scratch is a distro all of it's own, this thread is moved to Linux-Distributions.