[BusyBox] Base filesystem tarball for busybox?

Charles Steinkuehler charles at steinkuehler.net
Mon May 19 15:00:36 UTC 2003


Ole-Egil Hvitmyren wrote:
> Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
>> 
>> Maybe I'm dense, but why not just point folks to the many various 
>> distributions *ALREADY* using busybox?  These would provide various 
>> real-world examples of root filesystems pre-configured for various tasks 
>> and boot methods, plus this requires no extra work (except maybe adding 
>> a blurb to the webpage...the links to several existing disto's using 
>> BusyBox are already there).  Note that several of these distributions 
>> run busybox and a shell as an inital ramdisk (which is pretty much a 
>> minimal busybox system right there) then mount (or create) a more 
>> complex environmet to serve as the "real" root filesystem.  These 
>> systems provide two examples in one!
>> 
> 
> But do they provide an example, though? There's a BIG difference between 
> downloading the source to debians boot-floppies from the CVS server and 
> reading the source, and reading a small page with 10-20 lines describing 
> what Debian uses Busybox for, and what it does NOT use it for, and how 
> it was configured, and maybe also why.
> 
> One thing is saying "Debian uses Busybox, go look at their source code" 
> and saying "Debian uses Busybox like this:".

I see your point, but I wasn't thinking of anything like the Debian boot 
disks (which if they're anything like the RH boot disks, are pretty 
cryptic as far as how they work and what they do, as their sole purpose 
is to bring up enough of the system to let the GUI installer run, rather 
than providing a generic linux environment).

I was thinking more along the lines of the smallish or even 
single-floppy disto's, like LEAF or tomsrtbt.  These systems are 
typically setup to be a close aproximation of a "normal" linux system, 
but are simple enough you can figure out how they work via direct 
observation of the running environment without (much) need for pages of 
documentation describing exactly how everything works.

Just start with the initial ramdisk image for one of these 
distributions, look around the minimal initial root filesystem, and walk 
through /linuxrc and/or init|inittab to see what's going on (typically 
there's code to "fill-out" the initial root image with more device 
entries, installing extra packages, etc).  Once you understand how these 
minimal systems work, it should be pretty easy to start tweaking for 
your particular requirements...

NOTE:  If even the tiny single-disk distributions seem too confusing, 
you probably need to brush up on how linux works "behind the scenes" 
(ie: what's inittab, /linuxrc, and how do dynamic libraries work?). I'd 
steer folks in this catagory to the linux-from-scratch HOWTO as a good 
reference...anyone else have other suggestions?

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net




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