Niki Kovacs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Some time ago, I started a "Linux From Slack" project, e. g. a set of
> packages (with the according set of tagfiles) to achieve a minimal
> bootable system.
>
> I changed the approach to that (hence the new thread):
>
> ---8<---------------
> Once in a while, the question arises on AOLS or in some forum: what
> packages should I install to have a base system? Well, one could argue
> about what is meant. While some folks run no more than a kernel, a libc
> and a handful of packages on their servers stripped down to the bare
> bones, others might find such a configuration useful in the sense that
> chickens fly and horses swim.
>
> Some facts and figures:
>
> * A "base" install of Linux From Scratch consists of a little more
> than 50 packages.
> * Arch Linux' [base] system has exactly 92 packages.
> * A "minimal" install of CentOS 5.0 (all software categories
> unselected) counts as much as 393 packages.
>
> Conclusion: "Il y a fagots et fagots" (Molière, Le Médecin Malgré Lui)
> ---8<---------------
>
> You can read the rest here:
>
> http://slackwiki.org/Minimal_System

Excellent article, bookmarked!

I have only a remark about the nested table layout you have used: at
the moment
I am rebuilding my system, so I can only access it in Lynx and from
another
Windows machine. The article is hard to read in Internet Explorer and,
presumably
in Firefox. I need to wait and see how it looks in elinks, but in the
meantime,
could you consider converting your nested tables into definition
lists?

It'd make a much clearer output.

Anyway I'm planning to build such a minimal system in the near future.

Ottavio
http://www.pledgebank.com/boycottvista

Ottavio Caruso a écrit :
>
> Excellent article, bookmarked!

Thanks!

>
> I have only a remark about the nested table layout you have used: at
> the moment
> I am rebuilding my system, so I can only access it in Lynx and from
> another
> Windows machine. The article is hard to read in Internet Explorer and,
> presumably
> in Firefox. I need to wait and see how it looks in elinks, but in the
> meantime,
> could you consider converting your nested tables into definition
> lists?
>
> It'd make a much clearer output.

Hummm. I've displayed the site on three different machines, either with
Firefox and Konqueror (I don't have Windows and IE), and I've also tried
Lynx (which I use quite often), in xterm as well as in console mode
(800x600 framebuffer). Display is perfectly readable. Besides, reworking
the complete layout would be a *lot* of work.

Ciao,

Niki

Responding to Niki Kovacs...
> Ottavio Caruso a écrit :
>>
>> Excellent article, bookmarked!
>
> Thanks!
>
>>
>> I have only a remark about the nested table layout you have used: at
>> the moment
>> I am rebuilding my system, so I can only access it in Lynx and from
>> another
>> Windows machine. The article is hard to read in Internet Explorer and,
>> presumably
>> in Firefox. I need to wait and see how it looks in elinks, but in the
>> meantime,
>> could you consider converting your nested tables into definition
>> lists?
>>
>> It'd make a much clearer output.
>
> Hummm. I've displayed the site on three different machines, either with
> Firefox and Konqueror (I don't have Windows and IE), and I've also tried
> Lynx (which I use quite often), in xterm as well as in console mode
> (800x600 framebuffer). Display is perfectly readable. Besides, reworking
> the complete layout would be a *lot* of work.
>

Just checked using Lynx, Dillo, Firefox Looks fine to me.

Opera, however, is a different story, even when emulating Firefox or IE.

Mind you, this could be down to Opera's over ambitious "fit to width"
option. I still have no idea if this function is ON to work or OFF.

One way, everything looks fine, the other, stepped table cells. (I'm
blaming Opera for this one.)

I note you say you don't have IE, and your page code has

> Some facts and figures:
>
> * A "base" install of Linux From Scratch consists of a little more
> than 50 packages.
> * Arch Linux' [base] system has exactly 92 packages.

The new "core" repository has 159 packages .. it's pretty rich with
components, but should be enough for a minimal server.

> * A "minimal" install of CentOS 5.0 (all software categories
> unselected) counts as much as 393 packages.

This issue is very interesting especially for servers running in a virtual
machine.
BTW Ubuntu has aslo announced a minimal JeOS version (Just enough OS)
specially crafted for virtual machines.

--
damjan

Damjan wrote:


> This issue is very interesting especially for servers running in a virtual
> machine.
> BTW Ubuntu has aslo announced a minimal JeOS version (Just enough OS)
> specially crafted for virtual machines.
>

I've rolled my own script to build slack 12.0 based virtual machines, have a
dig around the linux section of http://www.petezilla.co.uk. I ought to
post the version 0.2 of the script, it is a bit more advanced and creates
the rc files to start up and shut down the virtual machine.

If this does not get broken due to word wrapping heres the link:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/peter.c...te-0.1.tar.bz2

Need to tidy up the config in ver 0.3.

Package wise it contains most of a, some of n and a couple from l.

Pete


--
http://www.petezilla.co.uk

On Sep 22, 6:36 am, Niki Kovacs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Some time ago, I started a "Linux From Slack" project, e. g. a set of
> packages (with the according set of tagfiles) to achieve a minimal
> bootable system.
>
> I changed the approach to that (hence the new thread):
>
> ---8<---------------
> Once in a while, the question arises on AOLS or in some forum: what
> packages should I install to have a base system? Well, one could argue
> about what is meant. While some folks run no more than a kernel, a libc
> and a handful of packages on their servers stripped down to the bare
> bones, others might find such a configuration useful in the sense that
> chickens fly and horses swim.
>
> Some facts and figures:
>
> * A "base" install of Linux From Scratch consists of a little more
> than 50 packages.
> * Arch Linux' [base] system has exactly 92 packages.
> * A "minimal" install of CentOS 5.0 (all software categories
> unselected) counts as much as 393 packages.
>
> Conclusion: "Il y a fagots et fagots" (Molière, Le Médecin Malgré Lui)
> ---8<---------------
>
> You can read the rest here:
>
> http://slackwiki.org/Minimal_System
>
> At the bottom of the page, I created a "Discussion" section. I'm all
> ears (eyes?) for suggestions.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Niki

Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
kernel and the bash shell?

frz wrote:

>> http://slackwiki.org/Minimal_System

> Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
> kernel and the bash shell?

Instead of the bash shell which at some circumstances might be considered
bloated you can have another smaller shell like zsh or the even smaller
ash.

The kernel mentioned on the page above is the kernel sources together with
gcc to rebuild a custom kernel.

So, for instance tomsrtbt is a tiny linux distribution linux which
consists of a single bootable floppy. It has ash instead of bash and of
course it doesn't have the kernel sources or any tools to compile a kernel.

regards Henrik
--
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc1(at)poolhem.se Examples of addresses which go to spammers:
root@localhost postmaster@localhost

frz wrote:
>
.... snip ...
>
> Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
> kernel and the bash shell?

Well, you might use the C-shell.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.




--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On 2007-09-24, frz wrote:
>
> Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
> kernel and the bash shell?


As someone else already mentioned, there's ash (which iirc, is used
by busybox), and you could certainly drop the most recent ksh release
in there for a shell that's plenty functional yet still relatively
light.

RW

frz a écrit :
>
> Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
> kernel and the bash shell?
>
1) The accent was on "... and the tools to rebuild it".

2) You don't have to use Bash necessarily. There are other shells.

Cheers,

Niki

On 2007-09-25, Robby Workman wrote:
> On 2007-09-24, frz wrote:
>>
>> Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
>> kernel and the bash shell?
>
>
> As someone else already mentioned, there's ash (which iirc, is used
> by busybox), and you could certainly drop the most recent ksh release
> in there for a shell that's plenty functional yet still relatively
> light.

I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
(45% is a wild guess).

Anyone with lots of time on their hands want to try this with
Slackware 12.0?

Jim

Jim Diamond a écrit :
>
> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
> (45% is a wild guess).
>
Boot speed seems a popular item in distro reviews. With all respect, but
I've never cared about boot speed, but much more about: what have I got
once my system has finished booting?

Would you choose your girlfriend by how fast she gets out of bed? )

Niki

PS: OK, into bed is another matter...

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:42:05 +0200, Niki Kovacs wrote:

> Jim Diamond a écrit :
>>
>> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
>> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
>> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
>> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
>> (45% is a wild guess).

Hmmmm. Let's investigate, shall we?

(FX: footsteps walking across room away from listener; sounds of laptop
keyboard being tapped; there is the occasional curse and intake of breath;
footsteps walk back towards the listener.)

OK, back again. My ubuntu 7.04 flaptop has /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
and has /bin/bash as well. Can't tell you much about dash from that, "man
dash" pops up the page for "man sh". I can tell you that bash is about
700kB and dash is about 80kB. That order of magnitude difference in size
could conceivably improve boot speed.

> Boot speed seems a popular item in distro reviews. With all respect, but
> I've never cared about boot speed, but much more about: what have I got
> once my system has finished booting?

Put boot speed right there with default colour schemes, choice of default
wallpaper, and number of clickable buttons in the installer, then :-)

> Would you choose your girlfriend by how fast she gets out of bed? )

If it's to make the morning coffee when the alarm rings, absolutely!

Boot speed does make a difference to people who have their flaptops with
them at all times, and who don't like to use suspend/resume too many times
between reboots (let's face it, there's too much flaky ACPI hardware out
there).

Most of the boot delay that I see in my machines is because I haven't
turned off a lot of services that start really slowly. And why do so many
distros run syslogd and klogd at the same time if boot speed (or even
performance) really matters?

On Sep 25, 2:37 am, Niki Kovacs wrote:
> frz a écrit :
>
> > Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
> > kernel and the bash shell?
>
> 1) The accent was on "... and the tools to rebuild it".
>
> 2) You don't have to use Bash necessarily. There are other shells.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Niki

Ok I get it. I saw it as the running kernel and not the source, and
the bash shell as again, the running shell. I know about the other
shells available but, I taught we were being specific on one shell to
incluse in this base install.

Another question; could a bootable system be just the running kernel
and a shell?

* Jim Diamond :
[ ... ]
> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
> (45% is a wild guess).

Debian and Ubuntu which is derived from it. dash is the Debian Almquist
Shell, a fork of the Almquist Shell (ash) which is also available in
Slackware.

Bash is reportedly slower at script execution than some other POSIX
shells including ash, Ksh, and Zsh.

> Anyone with lots of time on their hands want to try this with
> Slackware 12.0?

Wouldn't work since some Bash-ism exist in Slackware's initscripts.
Particularly, the usage of arrays in the networking scripts.

--
James Michael Fultz
Remove this part when replying ^^^^^^^^

On 2007-09-26, James Michael Fultz wrote:
> * Jim Diamond :
> [ ... ]
>> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
>> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
>> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
>> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
>> (45% is a wild guess).
>
> Debian and Ubuntu which is derived from it. dash is the Debian Almquist
> Shell, a fork of the Almquist Shell (ash) which is also available in
> Slackware.
Thanks for the details.


>> Anyone with lots of time on their hands want to try this with
>> Slackware 12.0?

> Wouldn't work since some Bash-ism exist in Slackware's initscripts.
> Particularly, the usage of arrays in the networking scripts.

In those cases, such scripts should read #! /bin/bash
anyway, since the assumption that "sh" == "bash" is a bug.

But one could run all the posix-compatible scripts with some faster
shell, which still might improve things. (My comments on that in
another reply here.)

Cheers.
Jim

On 2007-09-26, Mark South wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:42:05 +0200, Niki Kovacs wrote:
>
>> Jim Diamond a écrit :

>>> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
>>> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
>>> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
>>> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
>>> (45% is a wild guess).
>
> Hmmmm. Let's investigate, shall we?
>
> (FX: footsteps walking across room away from listener; sounds of laptop
> keyboard being tapped; there is the occasional curse
Waiting for it to boot?? :-)

>> Boot speed seems a popular item in distro reviews. With all respect, but
>> I've never cared about boot speed, but much more about: what have I got
>> once my system has finished booting?

> Put boot speed right there with default colour schemes, choice of default
> wallpaper, and number of clickable buttons in the installer, then :-)

>> Would you choose your girlfriend by how fast she gets out of bed? )

This has got to be one of the most bizarre (attempted) analogies I've
seen in a long time.

> Boot speed does make a difference to people who have their flaptops with
> them at all times, and who don't like to use suspend/resume too many times
> between reboots (let's face it, there's too much flaky ACPI hardware out
> there).
On my current laptops I have managed to beat the ACPI issues pretty
much into submission, and so normally I S2R and resume. But every now
and then I have to reboot (I sometimes need to check something out in
another version of Slackware or even (*cough*) another Linux distro,
and running it under VMware doesn't always cut it). So yes, boot may
only be 90 (?) seconds, but 50 would be nicer.

Cheers.
Jim

* Jim Diamond :
> On 2007-09-26, James Michael Fultz wrote:
[ ... ]
>> Debian and Ubuntu which is derived from it. dash is the Debian Almquist
>> Shell, a fork of the Almquist Shell (ash) which is also available in
>> Slackware.
> Thanks for the details.

I'm not sure how many other Linux distributions use something else
besides Bash for sh. NetBSD uses ash for '/bin/sh', and last I knew,
so does FreeBSD.

[ Bash-isms in shell scripts ]
> In those cases, such scripts should read #! /bin/bash
> anyway, since the assumption that "sh" == "bash" is a bug.

I agree wholeheartedly. Conversely, I've seen scripts that implicitly
invoke Bash but make no use of Bash's extensions. Unfortunately,
unintended(?) Bash-isms tend to make using another shell from Bash as sh
potentially problematic on Linux systems.

> But one could run all the posix-compatible scripts with some faster
> shell, which still might improve things. (My comments on that in
> another reply here.)

Care would have to be taken with scripts that source others as is the
case with some of Slackware's initscripts.

--
James Michael Fultz
Remove this part when replying ^^^^^^^^

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:00:50 -0300, Jim Diamond wrote:

> On 2007-09-26, Mark South wrote:
>> On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:42:05 +0200, Niki Kovacs wrote:
>>
>>> Jim Diamond a écrit :
>
>>>> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
>>>> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
>>>> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
>>>> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
>>>> (45% is a wild guess).
>>
>> Hmmmm. Let's investigate, shall we?
>>
>> (FX: footsteps walking across room away from listener; sounds of laptop
>> keyboard being tapped; there is the occasional curse
> Waiting for it to boot?? :-)

It's normally awake during the day. The cursing is because I am about the
world's second-worst typist.

>>> Boot speed seems a popular item in distro reviews. With all respect, but
>>> I've never cared about boot speed, but much more about: what have I got
>>> once my system has finished booting?
>
>> Put boot speed right there with default colour schemes, choice of default
>> wallpaper, and number of clickable buttons in the installer, then :-)
>
>>> Would you choose your girlfriend by how fast she gets out of bed? )
>
> This has got to be one of the most bizarre (attempted) analogies I've
> seen in a long time.

See the thread in alt.os.linux.ubuntu about mounting disks and where the
analogy with trees gets you :-)

>> Boot speed does make a difference to people who have their flaptops
>> with them at all times, and who don't like to use suspend/resume too
>> many times between reboots (let's face it, there's too much flaky ACPI
>> hardware out there).
> On my current laptops I have managed to beat the ACPI issues pretty much
> into submission, and so normally I S2R and resume. But every now and
> then I have to reboot (I sometimes need to check something out in
> another version of Slackware or even (*cough*) another Linux distro, and
> running it under VMware doesn't always cut it). So yes, boot may only
> be 90 (?) seconds, but 50 would be nicer.

Ideal boot time? Zero seconds, obviously. How much of your life do you
think has been spent waiting for systems to boot?