Re: new distribution

On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 15:44 -0600, Klaus Weidner wrote:
> > Can you suggest something that is minimal?
> 
> That's basically what the familiar, opie, OpenEmbedded, etc.
> distributions are aimed at, using ipkg which is somewhat dpkg compatible.
> I haven't used them in a long time (in fact I haven't even used my C750
> in months) so I can't comment on them.
> 


Yeah but my problem is that I wanted something that works, and if you
report a bug to people who are listed as responsible for that module you
dont get a bunch of people saying that they are just volunteers and
access to CVS ro so you cant submit fixes, etc..  

btw OpenEmbedded is a tool chain :)



> You can have an extremely small boot loader in the flash ROM (kernel,
> shell, a handful of tools to get the SD module loaded), then pivot_root.
> That will leave the rest of flash available for document storage. It can
> also be kind of useful to have a bootable Linux system independently from
> the SD for data recovery etc.
> 

Yes and there is a 'BootStrap' image that hh.org has its basically opie
or gpe without a GUI (what makes opie opie and gpe gpe).  But it would
still be awkward to mount effectivly a root partition as a subdirectory
somewhere to use it for document storage. 


> ... see above, that's what you get with a pivot_root. There will be a
> couple of MB of duplication though, but it's for a good cause.
> 

Ahh, but then my old root (flash) is more awkward to use becuase if its
mounted somewhere there is a heirarchy that must be maintained, yes I
can make links all over the place, but that isnt elegant either.


> > Until the SD drivers stablize a little I didnt want to commit to all or
> > nothing.  And with the latest handhelds.org release they got worse ...
> > After trying to fix one problem I was having I was thinking about
> > checking the status of the 2.6 series (I feel that would fix several
> > other issues I am having, specifically with POSIX compliance) and
> > possibly porting the drivers for my device to 2.6, if nothing else I
> > get to use mine :)
> 
> AFAIK you can't use 2.6 with SD cards since there is no open source
> driver and the closed-source driver module won't work.
> 
for ipaq the SD is open, but from what I was told its hardware
incompatible with zaurus.  However no one has ported it to 2.6 yet (the
API changed, I really havent looked into this yet, I had more pressing
matters in the short term, like getting a usable system - last night I
had the pleasure of a gpe welcome screen display for oh about 6 hours.
Couldnt turn it off, rebooting didnt work, this is what I am trying to
get away from ...


> I think people do partition disks, but along fairly clear usage lines
> (such as / vs /var) and not with a minimal but functional system on one
> partition and the rest on a different device. That breaks lots of
> assumptions made by dpkg.
> 

You are hanging out with different people than me :)  As for what I was
talking about before, you always had a usable system, but it was barely
usable with just / (why /sbin/sh was statically linked, and roots shell
was /sbin/sh not /bin/sh, lib was on a different partition, etc).  Of
course I come frome a time when 100M was a big disc and stuff *had* to
be on seperate discs.  Now 100G is average (and a lot cheaper) ...


> > I dont like the pivot_root concept becuase it relies on something being
> > on my flash that is no longer used, which seems a waste of space.  
> 
> I consider wasting a couple of MB a fair tradeoff versus having to spend
> several weeks of development and administration effort needed to work out
> a solution which may actually work less well in the end, but you're
> welcome to make your own choice on priorities of course ;-)
> 

it had to do with usability, if I was never going to use the data on the
flash partition I didnt want to waste it, but I think I have some stuff
worked out now, so that I might be able to deal with this.  However I am
probably going to get sleep first, maybe when I awake I will realize why
I didnt think of initrd and a couple other things last night.


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com

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