[aklug] Re: More questions about assembling Linux

On 09/16/2010 03:39 PM, Arthur Corliss wrote:
> 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. :-)
>

Found an /sbin/MAKEDEV on my host system. The only problem with it is
apparently the script doesn't have a switch for installing the device
files in a non-standard directory (so I can install them into the guest
system's partition, instead of the hosts /dev directory). So I guess
I'll have to copy the MAKEDEV script into the guest system, and run it
inside.

-- 
Christopher Howard
http://frigidcode.com
http://theologia.indicium.us
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