Cut down Linux (Debian)

Jul 07, 2006 5 Replies
M

Hi All,



I'm working on a firewall/NAT router project using Debian Sarge 3.1. Currently I have a hard disk based system, but I'd like it to run with a



128Mbyte CF card in a mini-ITX box. The firewall is working, but the standard installation system is a little on the large side.

Someone suggested I could replace the init process with a user script and only load those things I need, but init enables quite a few facilities, like gracefully shutting down/ booting up, gettys etc., so I'd like to keep it but maybe reduce the number of scripts run in /etc/rcS.d, and /etc/rc2.d directories, and then remove all the packages and files I don't want.



Is this a sensible approach and is there an easy way to do this cutting down? Would another init replacement, like runit, be better? I don't really know enough yet to build it up from scratch and I really need the firewall installed soon!



Thanks, any hints/suggestions would be gratefully received.



Mark.


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U

I used another way to strip down a normal debian installation:

- Create a normal debian install in a chroot-environment (install only necessary packages).

- Use a shell script which copies only the really necessary things on the cf-disk (use rsync for this) * no doc info and so on * no /var/lib/dpkg * keep out everything that is big and not used (use "du" and "sort" to get info of the biggest things)

So you have a normal debian install in a chroot (which is about 300MB) this can be kept updated when necessary. And you have a script to strip this down to the CF-disk. You dont need any new init-method. Oh and my CF-image is about 80MB in the end.

Gruss Ulli

\ E-Mail: calvin@akk.org \ / ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ / \ Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere \ / in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. (calvin) /
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M

Thanks, I'll give it a go!

Mark.

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M

Why not starting with the fli4l project instead ? They do an extremely small distribution for x86 especially tailored for routers.

-Michael

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S

Hi Mark, You could try replacing full fledged userland tools with

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Cheers, Ram

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M

Have you looked at openwrt.org (free Linksys router replacement) runs in

16MB ram and 4MB flash for storage. Uses squashfs and jffs2 for filesystem compression, and makes use of busybox and uClibc. Uses ipkg package system, and will handle debian packages, though ipackage packages are traditionally ".ipk".

Also Familiar which provides a full Linux GUI enviroment on a PDA.

The Linux router project is another popular embedded Linux opensource project (leaf.sourceforge.net).

Alpine linux is another embedded Linux

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--mikeb

~v

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