In the past week, I've been playing around with creating my own bootdisk. My eventual goal will be to create my own distribution. Redhat is very nice these days, but I think making my own could be a bit of fun.
I've been reading the Linux-From-Scratch, From Boot to Bash HOWTO, Bootdisk HOWTO, and the Kernel HOWTO. In the Bootdisk HOWTO, I found a link to a website to a utility called Busybox.
This utility is really cool. It puts several of the common commands such as 'tar' and 'ls' into a single executable. It even includes its own shell. instead of several commands that take up a few megabytes of diskspace, there is only one binary file that takes up about 250 /kilobytes/ of diskspace. Yes, you read correctly - kilobytes.
As a companion to the Busybox, there is also a libc replacement available called 'uClibc' - the 'u' appears to be a replacement for the greek letter 'mu' which stands for 'micro' in technical circles.
And as the perfect complement to Busybox, there is the login manager utility called Tinylogin. It provides 'login' and 'getty' and a few other *nix tools all in a single binary file.
And to round all of this out, the developer and maintainer of Busybox has provided a disk image (a bit dated, but a good place to start) of a single floppy Linux disk using these three packages.
Where can you get all this good stuff? Why at the Busybox homepage of course:
http://www.busybox.net/
Have fun.
