Creating a mini-linux home-made distribution

nutshell · 07-05-2002, 11:27 PM

Hi,

How hard is it to create a home-made mini-linux distribution that fits on a floppy and which only contains some basic commands? This is not classified as LFS right? Is there any place that can start me off?

THanks

DavidPhillips · 07-05-2002, 11:46 PM

here is a good one

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/

nutshell · 07-06-2002, 04:07 AM

OK. But how can I display a splash screen showing for example a picture or who made this mini-distro before it boots or after it boots?

Many thanks, i'm really interested

MasterC · 07-06-2002, 04:24 AM

You could probably do a bootsplash when lilo pops up. I didn't read the entire how to, just a flip through so I don't know if this is possible though.

nutshell · 07-06-2002, 04:33 AM

I see some mini-distributions have their own splash screens. Two examples are Hal91(http://www.itm.tu-clausthal.de/~perle/hal91/) and Tomsrtbt(http://www.toms.net/rb/). I don't think they even have lilo.

MasterC · 07-06-2002, 04:43 AM

Well, I am gonna email him and ask him to put the answer on here.

mailto:Tom@Toms.Net

That's his email address if you want to also.

MasterC · 07-06-2002, 04:48 AM

Cool, email is sent. I asked tom if he would reply on here.

Cool

nutshell · 07-06-2002, 05:12 AM

Thnx. I guess i'll just wait for him to come here then ^_^.

Oh but i'm not sure if tom's one is just ascii art or real pictures. But i'm sure Hal91's one is a graphic.

DavidPhillips · 07-06-2002, 10:08 AM

use lilo or grug

nutshell · 07-06-2002, 07:16 PM

But do they use lilo?

finegan · 07-06-2002, 07:48 PM

They can, the making your own boot disk option as Dave pointed out from the how-to at linuxdoc. Hal doesn't I don't think, but Toms does.

Tom's is the absolute most stuff I've ever seen crammed on a 3.5. The only downshot to it is that there's no support for the journalling filesystems or ntfs so its loosing a little ground in the "save anything" category. Telnet, mount, they're all there, so I once used Tom's to move a mountain of data off of a laptop with a scorched win 2k partition (that happened to be formatted fat32 for some reason).

Cheers,

Finegan

Phonics3k · 07-06-2002, 08:26 PM

i made my own bootdisk within about 5mins, i want a graphic too but every attempt has failed

nutshell · 07-06-2002, 10:25 PM

Oh did you just recompiled the kernel and stuff. How did you attempt to put your own graphics or text during boot time?

nutshell · 07-07-2002, 09:53 PM

For tom's it's just ascii. But for Hal91 there's a graphic. DO i just need to use lilo to do that? But if tomsrtbr and Hal91 both don't use lilo, there must be some other way.

zLinuxz · 07-07-2002, 10:20 PM

hey, like what is this used for?
it's like an entire linux system in 1 floppy disk?, like an entire distribution in a floppy?