Linux In A Box

Henrik pointed us to the Linux in a Box project, which is a bitchin' little project to create an inexpensive little Linux box: it boots a 2.0.36 kernel from a ramdisk, and it's pingable and Telenetable, as well as being usable as a Web server. Only for the brave of heart and willing to hack.

Comments

What about the children?

[freebe]

a bitchin' little project

Please stop using these nasty words on Slashdot. Sites like this that are child-accessible should know to restrain their content in the face of pending laws. How many times does it need to be told to people that content that is offensive to children needs to be kept away from them?

it boots a 2.0.36 kernel

On top of that, you go and influence these poor suggestable little children with thoughts of running an outdated kernel that is simply a security hole! How do you even dare? Would you allow your children to use NT3.5? Would you allow them to use an outdated kernel? Think, Taco, what about the children?

it's pingable and Telenetable, as well as being usable as a Web server. Only for the brave of heart and willing to hack.

I think you meant willing to be hacked. Once again, what about the children? Would you let your child use telnet? Why suggest it to the children on Slashdot? You should know better than that. As a maintainer of a website like this, you have a responsibility to not influence suggestible little children with Nazi ideas such as running Telnet on a computer.

Supercheap Linux system w/firewall

[www.sorehands.com]

Why bother with a special embedded system? If you are looking for a cheap system, why not take an old 386 system/paperweight and setup the Floppy Firewall?

This is a simple distro (free!) that gets you up and running on a low-end system w/o a hard drive.

Get your Floppy Firewall at http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw.

If it don't have what you want, you can always add more. But, if you add too much, you might have to add a hard drive.

This is easy!

[smurd]

We have been Shipping PC-104 linux boxes for the past 2 years. All it took was a Slackware rescue floppy, a bootdisk and an EPROM burner.

The procedure for making the EPROMS for the RTD PC-104 card is as follows:

1. Fire up the card with +5 and 12 volts
2. Create a freshly formatted floppy with the included Datalight DOS 5.0 on it. I know, it's sad but we had some DOS setup code for the card.
3. Drop loadlin and the kernal You DID build a baby size kernal for this with initrd right? on the floppy
4. Create a ramdisk on you development system to build the root image for your new card
5. umount the ramdisk
6. Set the ramdisk to zeros with:
   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 count=4096
7. Make a filesystem
   mke2fs -vm0 /dev/ram0 4096
8. Mount the ramdisk and copy your root filesystem in:
   mount -t ext2 /dev/ram0 /mnt
   cp -pxR /projects/snmp/root_fs/* /mnt
9. unmount it again and squish it down with:
   umount /mnt
   dd if=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=4096 | gzip -v9 > /projects/snmp/eprom/root_fs.gz
10. Now, use sneaker net to move the floppy to the DOS machine running the RTD supplied EPROM image maker and tell it to make the entire floppy into an EPROM image .BIN file(s)
11. Burn the files into EPROM, plug 'em into the card, apply power and open a beer as you watch Linux boot on a 4 inch card

Have fun.