[tlug] A Distro Question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Kenneth Burling writes:

 > One of the things I would like to do, is that one one of the hard
 > drives I will install Ubuntu or some other reasonably solid/stable
 > distro.  One one of the others, I wish to install a system that
 > will basically need to be built from the ground up.

The mainstream bootloaders (lilo and grub) can handle booting a kernel
on a different device (partition or drive), so why not just start with
/vmlinuz, /bin/bash (statically linked), and /sbin/init->/bin/bash?
:-)

After booting, "just mount" your fully loaded disk and start copying
the bare minimum needed stuff.  (The quotes mean that you will find
"just mounting" to be more easily said than done, but I'll let you
enjoy finding out about that.  ;-)

 > Would a stage 1 install of gentoo fit the bill perhaps?

No.  Stage N installs of Gentoo for N < 3 are intended only for
bootstrapping Gentoo.  There will be crap in there that you definitely
don't need, and other stuff that you really ought to have will be
missing.

 > :P And how tricky is it to recompile the compiler after installing
 > a new kernel?

If the new kernel is Mach, you will be living in interesting times.
But basically compiling a compiler is just like compiling anything
else, maybe simpler.  Compilers really only *need* stdio from the OS,
so in principle they are a lot easier to build than (say) networking
programs or file systems.

If you're interested in learning about that end of things, maybe you
want a compilerless OS instead.  Ie, everything has to be
cross-compiled, and copied into place.  It's easier to build a correct
xc environment if you are targeting an architecture that's different
from the build system though.  (Ie, it's too easy to cheat by linking
against libraries on the build system that aren't present for the xc
environment if build and target systems are the same.)