miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD

dnaumov writes "miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD is a great guide, which explains in great detail, how you can create a truly small installation of FreeBSD on your system, completely by yourself. There is also the PicoBSD project, which has similar goals, but it's based on an outdated version of FreeBSD and is considered to be way too minimalistic (2 floppies) by many. The guide will walk you through things like creating the directory tree inside a chroot jail, rebuilding the bootloader and everything else needed to create a FreeBSD install that takes just around 20 MB of space."

Comments

PicoBSD and miniBSD have two different goals

[eht]

The Tentative PicoBSD FAQ has useful information on how to built a PicoBSD build out of the current source tree and therefore isn't anywhere near two years old, nor does it build to two floppies, there are three differnet versions of it with a fourth in psuedo permanent beta testing

miniBSD has a different aim of not so much tweaking, for example in PicoBSD SSH daemon and client are just two aspects of one program instead of two sperate programs because of all the shared code between them, it's more meant to run on compact flash and is easier to update since PicoBSD is a compressed bootable image

Re:Are there any miniBSD's akin to uClinux?

[tigga]

Well, check out NetBSD - they support 39 platforms('ports').
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/

Re:Amazingly, almost half of that is perl!

[alexpage]

Who the fuck modded you up like your "emphasis" means anything? Perl is big. Everybody knows this. It's got a lot of "core" modules that help it do its job, a common base that other modules can build against safely. Its size is one reason that FreeBSD has been looking to remove any dependency on it in the base install, though it'll still be available as a port.

Your "emphasis" seems like pointless perl bashing to me.

Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD?

[evilviper]

Hmm, how much smaller? Do you have number at hand or just think so?

Well, emBSD (small OpenBSD distro) fits on a 32MB flash card with room to spare, and that includes SSH, IPSec, pf, network card drivers, etc. No doubt it could be made much smaller.

I don't see much complexity in FreeBSD setup/configure/maintain... If OpenBSD even less complex then it's missing some features?

It's not missing any features, it's just a better, simpler, configuration system. Try it some time, rather than just complaining about what you don't know.

instead of PF you could use IPFW or IPF or both simultaneously ;P

No other firewall software out there has anything like PF-Auth. Then there is ALTQ which has been merged with PF to allow complex bandwidth limiting. PF also has SCRUB and MODULATE STATE directives, which clean up packets, and provide more security for the network. Then there is all of PF's advanced options.

Do you have bigger list of "great programs that FreeBSD lacks"? BTW there is a systrace port for FreeBSD

Those were just off the top of my head... There are certainly more. You are welcome to install OpenBSD and find out for yourself. And it's good to hear the systrace port is finished.

Couple years ago I tried to run OpenBSD on 486. I remember it was definitely slower than FreeBSD on the same hardware..

Well, the one place that FreeBSD has an advantage is kernel startup times on slow hardware. After startup, it should run jut as fast. Besides, it sounds like you haven't tried it in some time (or on very modern hardware)... It was around Release 2.8 that OpenBSD got a big speed boost.