[BusyBox] Tiny linux

Joseph Chiu josephc at idealab.com
Wed Aug 28 12:23:03 UTC 2002


On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Willem Oldeman wrote:

> Dear everyone,
>
> I'm new to Busybox and hope I can ask a question to you. (If not, which
> mailing list should I ask?)
>
> I want to get a 486/66 up and running. It has enough RAM (40M), but little
> diskspace (400M), so no ordinary modern distro's for that machine.
> My idea was to start it from scratch, but it needs some basic
functionality
> (networking, telnet & ftp)
>

With ucilbc+busybox, I have a working Linux kernel plus a working shell
environment (using busybox) in about 3.2 MB of FLASH on my MIPS-based
system.  This includes very basic networking (wget, ping, nc, and more from
busybox; plus telnet, telnetd, iproute2 [ip and tc] built from scratch).
Heck, I even have it running NFS client.

Since MIPS is a RISC, and I haven't used compression on the kernel itself,
I'm sure the same functionality made for x86 can fit on a single 1.4 MB
floppy.

I've found that the best source of information on making a tiny Linux from
scratch was websites dedicated to embedded Linux.  They tend to go through
the entire Linux + application process thoroughly.  Having a fast PC to do
the development helps, though.

Good luck.  There might be a little bit of hair pulling at times, but the
experience is very educational, rewarding, and fun.




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