Building a LFS system on a 250mb zipdisk

[Cryptonica]

okie here is my question is it possable for me to build an lfs system on a zip disk that i could boot with a floppy a portable LFS if u will :)

[vegetableofdoom]

Most likely yes. You might have to do a little hacking depending on what distro you want to use. If you have the time you could try to build it yourself
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Or you maybe its possible to do a very custom install of RH and see how small you can get it, though I'm a newbie myself so I can't be certain. But I would love to know how you did it.

[bdl]

You may or may not be aware of ZipSlack (http://www.slackware.com/zipslack) which is identical to what you want to do, although it's been around for quite a few years and was originally meant for the 100mb ZIP. I believe there are others that have done this sort of thing on an LS-120 as well; it's definitely possible, expecially with the 250mb cap now. Hell, with 250mb you could run a basic distro and a light X install. Give it a shot.


I happen to think, the ZipSlack install is meant for the FAT partitioning on the ZIP disks, but you can create ext2 partitions on the disk and mount it the same as any other native linux disk. You might even be able to do reiserfs on it....


[ 13 June 2001: Message edited by: bdl ]

[655321]

Wow, that would be cool. I would try it if I had a Zip Drive. Let us know how it goes!

[Cryptonica]

Hiya guys its me again :)


first off yes i am aware of zipslack and big slack
zip slack runs just as well if not better* on a 250mb ZD (* better being the fact i have 150mb of free space to play with)

now what i am aiming for is
a. think super repair disk in those totaly unwanted situations where a reinstall may be needed the lfs system on my zip would be my base lfs system that would need to be copyed to my hd to get my basic system up such as my networking and display ect the rest could be downloaded from the net or be retreived from burnt cd's

b. if i go to a friends house and stay for a while i would toss my ZD in and boot it
now i know that its portabilty would be weak due to the fact alot of people have differnt hardware and one would have to set the lfs system to run on there hardware if at all even possable (but in my case i built all my friends systems they have all the same hardware and cpus ect and i do roam quite a bit :)
c. i think it would be a good learning experince

as far as RH goes i wont touch it with a 20' stick not to say its bad or good simply not my flavor...slack or debian is my flavor :)

[ 15 June 2001: Message edited by: Cryptonica ]

[ph34r]

You could do it, but LFS takes a lot of time and TONS of space for compiling, etc. Once it is done, you can get it down to around 300mb for a really bare system (no Q3, Descent, UT, etc.).

Have you thought about Peanut linux? KDE 2.x, etc. in a smallll package.

Oh, and I wouldn't worry too much about portability- not everyone has 250mb zip disks :).