[aklug] Re: More questions about assembling Linux

On Thu, 16 Sep 2010, Christopher Howard wrote:

> Two more questions:
>
> 1) Is there a good, tiny drop-in shell that a guy could use instead of
> bash (for a very small Linux system)? The bash binary seems to be rather
> large (700K+) plus all the configuration files that come with it; also
> it seems to have a lot of dependencies that aren't strictly necessary
> (like ncurses) and also dynamically loads some other libraries during
> runtime (to my suprise).
>
> I guess Bash probably has to be installed anyway, for most applications,
> but I am still curious if there is something more lightweight.

What you're looking for is busybox. It also emulates a crap-load of regular
system utilities and can be statically compiled. Which is why it's so
heavily used as the default shell/user-land of embedded systems and
initframfs.

> 2) Is udev a required component, or can you just copy in a set of static
> dev files? If static works, are these static files part of a package on
> the Internet somewhere?

Static works just fine. The majority of nodes are documented in the
kernel source in Documentaiton/devices.txt. There used to be a script
called MAKEDEV that would create a good default base set (and apply the
normal permissions). Just don't make /dev a tmpfs and you'll be fine. :-)

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Thu Sep 16 15:40:04 2010