On Monday, October 14, 2002, Frank McConnell wrote:
> You may need more than 8MB of RAM to run FreeBSD versions >= 3.
I did 3.4 in 8MB, IIRC. It was a 486-class SBC with 8MB RAM and an 8MB
DiskOnChip.
> There's been some recent discussion on the freebsd-stable mailing list
> about how to do a small installation, where "small" would appear to be in
> the 14-83MB range.
At one time I was working on a distribution-maker for FreeBSD. You wrote one
file that was a complete distro config, and you handed it to my program,
which would do all the build/package work and spit out a disk/ROM image. I
had a working prototype version, but was pulled off the project by my
employer, who needed me to work on other things. I called it TinyBSD,
because it was more generically applicable and configurable than PicoBSD
which, in truth, was inextricably coupled to the idea of floppy disks. I
still have the domain name tinybsd\.(com|net|org) registered.
Getting paid to work on embedded FreeBSD was wonderful while it lasted. It's
a pipe dream, but I would give away all my classiccmps if I could only have
a steady position doing that again.
> There's also the PicoBSD project whose aim is (or at least used to be) a
> floppy-sized installation based on FreeBSD.
If it's anything like PicoBSD used to be, it is useful only as a learning
tool -- learning how to do it the right way. :-( The upshot of this is that,
with moderate knowledge of UNIX, you can learn how to create a custom
FreeBSD distro in an afternoon, reading the PicoBSD shell scripts.
--
Jeffrey Sharp
Received on Mon Oct 14 2002 - 11:50:01 BST