[BusyBox] init - newbie question

[Tim Riker]

400M? That's still in the large category. You might try a Debian install
for starters. Many of the packages you would need woul already be there.
Start with a minimal install and then "apt-get" only the packages you
need. You should be able to meet your needs with less than 300M of
space.

Then once you have that working you could replace things with
busybox/tinylogin to save more space if needed.

as for your floppies, try passing init=/bin/sh to the kernel and see if
you at least get a shell prompt.

check /etc/inittab to be sure you start a getty on tty1 (or ttyS0 if
serial). check /dev/to be sure /dev/console is there and that it is a
device node, NOT a symlink.

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)
> 
> So, in comes a kernel (2.4.18) and Busybox+Tinylogin.
> The kernel and root filesystem are on seperate compressed floppies.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> The problem: init seems to stall, the last messages seen are:
> VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press enter
> RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
> VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 76k freed.
> After that, the system is dead (but echoes keystrokes).
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I have compiled everything on a modern Linux PC, using GCC flags "-O2
> -march=i486" to generate optimized 486 code. (following the Bootdisk-HOWTO).
> 
> The kernel is one with very basic functionality without modules.
> It has support for a yucky network card (Natsemi 83815), basic networking,
> ext2, /proc and /dev/pts support.
> 
> I changed the Makefile for Busybox to create a static binary and to enable
> TFTP and TELNET.
> The Makefile for Tinylogin was also modified to create a static binary.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Can someone point me in the right direction? So far I believe that init ->
> busybox is playing up?
> 
> Thanks,
> - Willem
> 
> _______________________________________________
> busybox mailing list
> busybox at busybox.net
> http://busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox

-- 
Tim Riker - http://rikers.org/ - TimR at Debian.org
Lineo CTO - Tim at Lineo.com - http://www.Lineo.com/
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