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Linux on a Floppy: Intro to Mini Linux Distros
GonzoJohn writes: "If you've ever been stuck on the freeway with a flat tire and no jack, you know what it's like to have a Linux system crash and not have a boot disk. And although nearly every Linux distribution company asks you make a boot/recovery floppy when you install Linux for the first time, many users skip this important step. Out of the boot/recovery disk concept was born the Mini-Linux distribution." Read this article on Linux Orbit, with a brief intro to some of the mini-distros available.
Yes, this is nice ... in case of a disk failure, simply flop in the floppy, reboot an your server is running again, at least for gateway services!
Life sucks.
When I want a boot disk I use SuperRescue. Nowa days every one has a cd burnner and CDRs are dirt cheap. Besides when was the last time you could find a blank floppy in less then 10 minutes?
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Is what I use as my gateway. Boots off a floppy, runs on this crappy little 486, and firewalls me (to a certain degree) from a lot of crap out there.. Very useful for people with multiple PCs and a cable connection. Easy to setup and configure. Their website has a download of the floppy image, a manual and extras (e.g. drivers for network cards). Worth checking out.
[lame windows weenie troll starts]
You mean that Linux crashes?
What is next? Blue screen's of death?
[/lame windows weenie troll ends]
The truth of the matter is that in a Windows NT or 2000 server you can boot the box off the install CD and run a repair utility. freeBSD can be installed off two floppies and over the network, and it cannot be that hard to add to the floppy images enough functionality to add a repair program.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Why anybody would want to use a foreign OS like Linux instead of supporting their country and using an American OS like Windows is beyond me. If Osama bin Laden knew anything about computers, you can bet he'd be a Linux user. Hint to the clueless: the terrorist attacks hit our economy hard. Boycotting a Godly, moral American company like Microsoft is pretty much a second wave of the 9/11 attacks. Don't be hateful. Support your country.
The tomsrtbt boot disk. IMO, is by far the best rescue disk available. In 1.44 megs of space they've managed to pack over 160 common utilities, and that's not including the kernel modules! You can grab a copy of the boot image at http://www.toms.net/rb/
This thing has saved my ass several times.
CD drives are a waste of space on anything except desktop machines.
No Floppy drives are a wast eof space on every computer.
You can easly slip in a laptop style cd-rom drive onto a 1U server.
I't takes up so little space that it dosen't nead it's own drive bay.
A floppy OTOH neads it's own drive bay.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
In this context fli4l should be mentioned. It's an amzing single-floppy distribution and while primarily targeting on router/firewall tasks it is very extensible. The reason it is not so very well known is probably the fact that most of it's documentation is in German. But it's definitely worth a look. Also check this.
--- censored
If you've ever been stuck on the freeway with a flat tire and no jack, you
know what it's like to have a Linux system crash and not have a boot disk.
I know what it was like to have TWO flat tires on a country road, with nothing but
a $1500 Presario lap top. It was "Redneck Rampage", those fuckers even took my boots.
For a firewall sitting between my LAN and my cable modem, I use LRP. Runs on anything from a 486 upwards, off a floppy. Once you've finished configuring the floppy (takes between 5 mins and 3 hours, depending on how experienced you are with Linux and networking), you can simply write-protect it, and you have a completely uncrackable system. If someone breaks into it, just reboot the computer and it'll load everything back into ramdisk. It can also act as a dhcp and dns server. Check hereand here for documentation.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
And lets not forget BusyBox - which makes most of these distributions possible. Even Red Hat boot disks use BusyBox these days.
Ra for Tom.
Cheers, Andy!
Andy Rabagliati
(this ones based on BSD IIRC)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I've used floppy distros to rescue Windows boxes for more often than I've used them for rescuing linux. NT password crackers, disk utils, tiny editors, you name it - I used to carry a syslinux disk around with me at our all-NT shop just in case, and by the time I left I wasn't the only one using them.
All the rave, those floppy disk linux distros. Over the past few years, I've learned to love tomsrtbt (Tom's RootBoot).
...I want the iso!
Then, last year, I found some Business Card CDRs, which hold 30-50mb and fit in your wallet.
Naturally, I wanted a super-utility boot disk. My ideal was high; mix tomsrtbt with a standard Win98 boot disk (essential for flashing) and a few other tools. Multiboot? Now there's a tough subject. Even with the best guide to making bootable cdroms I could find, it was hopelessly difficult.
When I saw this post on Slashdot, I knew I had to post this little story. In researching it, I actually found an answer to the question I wanted to pose to all of you; does anybody know of a linux distribution for these business card cdrs.
LNX-BBC is just that. Anybody tried it? Anybody know of another one? Anybody made a multi-boot linux/dos businesscard cdr?
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Cool I guess.
All I know is that the I can just beraly rember the last time I use a floppy for anything. What I do remember is swearing under my breath the whole time about how slow it was.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
for almost everything. It is designed as a security testing tool, but I found its "download and install into ram" abilities so useful I had it set up to ghost machines, repair stuff, set up an emergency mail server...
As well as stress test the IDS we were writing. Brilliant.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Comes with a business card sized Sysadmin CD. Pop it into your wallet, have it anywhere. You can buy blank business card CDs and burn your own.
Get a free ipod.
I find the bootable CD-ROM distributions more useful. They contain things like X with a window manager and web browser, net connectivity via ethernet or dialup, XFS and Reiser support, and other useful goodies that would never fit on a floppy distro. And CD-ROM drives are dirt cheap, and nearly as pervasive as floppy drives.
:-)
My two favorites are related branches, LNX-BBC, a spinoff from Linuxcare's bootable toolkit, found here. Both have advantages over the other, and will fit on credit-card sized CD's, so you can fit 'em in your wallet (try that with a floppy
Another cool one, which also has the advantage of letting folks try a more full-bodied Linux without installing anything, is DemoLinux. It even contains StarOffice on a fully self-contained bootable CD-ROM. Very cool.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
've wondered sometimes if the makers of floppy disks have lowered the quality of the disks over the last 10 years.
Yes, quality has fallen because:
1) Who is going to pay a premium for a good floppy?
2) Data density has increased so each bit has a weaker field and smaller footprint than the old 720 Kb disks - easier to demagnetise or scratch.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
how exactly are you mounting your cd-rom drive with these utilities? a floppy of this type is basically useless for anything other than formatting/changing partitions. this reminds me of the win95 recovery disk that doesn't have cdrom support. in order to re-install win95 on a machine i have to use a win98 boot floppy to get cdrom drivers loaded, then put in the win95 cdrom to install it. didn't every machine have cdrom when win95 was released?
Yet another BBC ("bootable business card") cd is maintained by redhat.de (german subsidiary).
Although aimed mainly at redhat users, it's pretty comprehensive and you can debug/fiddle with your other partitions (win32, ntfs). It's fairly up-to-date, also.
Grab it here
Details
Contents
Self extracting archive - run unzip on it to extract it linux.
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
Don't forget the BSD's have things like this too. Tsk, anyone would think the BSD's and the Linux's aren't on speaking terms or something :)
/usr/src/release/picobsd/
PICOBSD(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual PICOBSD(8)
NAME
picobsd - floppy disk based FreeBSD system
DESCRIPTION
picobsd is a script which can be used to produce a minimal implementation
of FreeBSD (historically called PicoBSD) which typically fits on one
floppy disk, or can be downloaded as a single image file from some media
such as CDROM, flash memory, or through etherboot.
The boot media (typically a floppy disk) contains a boot loader and a
compressed kernel which includes a memory file system. Depending on the
media, it might also contain a number of additional files, which can be
updated at run time, and are used to override/update those in the memory
file system.
Would be handy actually.
Boot floppy, brings up network, contacts backup server, partitions disks, creates filesystems and begins restoring all the data from the backup server.
Deleted
Who needs a floppy disk, when you can boot your machine off of PAPER?
Yes folks, my very own FSMOS is able to do just that.
Prior art man. 30 years ago I used to boot a PDP-8 off punched paper tape. Just load that tape into the reader and let it fly. 20 minutes later and the computer was ready to rip, all 4K of 12 bit work memory ripped to go.
I used to use Zip disks back in the day when you could reasonably do viable a viable installation (one with development tools, editors, networking, etc etc) on 100MB. The "rescue" disk and the drive wsas portable to whatever machine it was needed on, reasonably fast and was a writable medium for saving configs or other data if it was determined that the original disk was dead (yes, there was actually 10-20 MB of FREE disk space).
It seems like the last time I tried to make a boot disk this way I couldn't get a basic install to fit on 100MB.
Removable IDE sleds sound the ideal solution, but so many boxes don't have room for them. A bootable CD seems like the most portable, although it lacks a writable filesystem.
I am currently scanning very old (50-100 years)family photos for distribution to the family on CD. I want to create a CD that is bootable and will go from a cold machine to an X11 desktop and immediatly start doing a slide show of the photos on the CD.
As a bonus, it looks like to me that a CD like this would be a great way for Linux to get exposure running business slideshows or product demos.
Therefore, it would have to logon as root (?), autoconfigure X11, and start playing. In addition, I would also put a 'autorun.inf' and copy of 'iview32' (win32 viewer) on it for those who shove it in and use with Winddows.
The basic requirements I can think of are:
1. All opensource/freeware
2. Linux Autoboot, Configure, Play etc.
3. Smallest disk space requirement, saving CD space for the pictures.
4. Ease of use. Might be nice to break out of the slide show and view pictures under user control.
Any ideas on what to use?
Which of these distros being discussed to use?
What Linux program will do the slide show?
How to autoconfig X11 if the distro doesn't?
How to autologon?
Hopefully this list is helpful to those of you just starting to think about tiny distros.
-- null
I was a little disappointed by the article; I've tried Mandrake, RedHat, and Debian but my current system is one I built from ground up from source. There's a lot of lip-service paid to the merits of really learning linux and its internals, through things like the Power-up to Bash prompt HOWTO, but I don't see many people actually doing it.
I've only been using linux since December, but I think building my own system has taught me a thing or three that someone who has used, for example Mandrake for a few years wouldn't know.
There's much to be said for learning by doing. I was expecting a little more than a listing of ready-made distros.
People have been predicting that it will take a dumbing down of some sort for linux to become a viable alternative on the desktop. Is this it?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
What a coincidence. Ramfloppy rescued my ass this weekend when the shit hit the fan with my system (*cough* hdparm *cough*).
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Why should I buy and install an archaic piece of hardware just for disaster recovery? The distributions should supply programs to help me make boot CDROMs.