I am charged with getting RHEL 5 set up for our embedded system (a VersaLogic Cheetah VL-EPM-32v). I have two basic questions - are there some good references for determining what packages we should choose when installing? Should I un-check everything, and just add in the few things I need (like ntp, ftp, nfs, vim, etc)? The manifest seemed like a good start towards understanding what all of these packages are for, but holy cow - there are a lot of them - how do I know what the OS needs. Can I assume the OS doesn't need any of them? We do need some stuff, at least enough to build our application, do some primitive debugging, and whatever resources to get information to/from the stack.

Second question - is there a best way to automatically spawn our embedded program on startup? Currently, we use mingetty, monkey with the runtime-level stuff, spawn our application as a daemon, and use a lock file so only one gets spawned, etc. It seems like it works well, but I thought I would poke around and check for better ways. Is there a preferred way using something which already exists in RHEL 5?

Thanks,

-Kevin

I don't konw of any specific references that might be particularly good in your situation. It has been a while since I did a fresh Redhat 5 install, but if they have gotten rid of the pre generated minimal configuration, I would suggest going through and unchecking everything that you don't need. The installer will resolve any dependency issues for you.

As to your second question, your current setup for launching the program sounds like the correct approach to me.