How many run Linux on their car PC? - Page 2

unrealer33 · 08-02-2003, 04:54 AM

Well, tried freepia. Didnt work for me cause I dont have an EPIA-M. Guess i'll try an install of zip slack. I really just want to try the Freevo..Does anyone know of anothe cdrom bootable disto with Freevo bundled??

EDIT: I was reading about zipslack. Does it not have a GUI? From the reading it does not appear to. Just a console. Are there any other small distros, like freepia? I do have a copy of Mandrake 9 here. How do you think that would work?

unrealer33 · 08-02-2003, 04:45 PM

I did an install of MDK9, and installed Freevo. And I must say im hooked!! That is a sweet piece of software. Better than anything available on the PC now for in-car (or htpc) use. MDK9 got down to about 270 or so mb with minimal packages. But should I do Slack instead?

And how are the boot times on linux? Would it be better than 98 lite?

SiGmA_X · 08-02-2003, 04:56 PM

Unrealer33 - No flavor of Linux has a GUI built in. Some include them with their packages, but Linux does not have a std GUI. You can use Fluxbox, Blackbox, KDE, etc as your GUI, which are all really easy to use. I am working on my Debian skillz. I should have it down to under 128MB by tonight!

unrealer33 · 08-02-2003, 05:06 PM

yea, well thats what i meant. A distro with a window manager packaged.

I found this distro http://www.ibiblio.org/vectorlinux/ Based on slack. Anyone heard of it? ISO is only 225 mb.

When you get your custom linux distro finished are you going to put it up for D/L, and/or post instructions on what I need to do to duplicate it?

SiGmA_X · 08-02-2003, 05:12 PM

Mine? It's not really custom... It's just striped Debian, with an (optional, I'm doing it of course) striped kernel. Yeah I guess I could put up the commands to remove the bloat. It's not going to fit onto an 8MB card, I am not that good at Linux, but I think that it should fit on to a 128MB card and have a GUI... That is the goal at least!

BTW, I would really like to talk to anyone using Linux on their CarPC, or anyone who has experience removing the general bloat from Linux (Yeah, that is a term used in Windows... I mean the extra packages

)

unrealer33 · 08-02-2003, 05:55 PM

what are your boot times on that?

jospfh · 08-03-2003, 05:41 AM

Zipslack is not just a small slackware. It is a basic version of slackware compressed as zip to be installed on a FAT filesystem. You might as well install slackware and just be carefull with not selecting to much packages, same effect.

But to give linux a try zipslack is great because you don't need a free partition. It can be installed in a directory on a FAT partition. It is booted from pure DOS.

So for a carputer i sugest you use slackware.

Jospfh

SiGmA_X · 08-03-2003, 07:35 AM

I think I might go with Slack. I was trying Debian today, and it was at about 220MB once I installed the GUI stuff (Blackbox and X) so it's too big for what I really want.. I downloaded Slackware tonight, and I'll give it a shot tomorrow

unrealer33 · 08-03-2003, 05:46 PM

what about gentoo?? you should beable to get that pretty small and custom as well. WIth the kernel being compiled at installation and what not.

SiGmA_X · 08-03-2003, 05:47 PM

Yes, I was looking at Gentoo as well

But since I don't have the CD yet, I'll try Slack. I currently have it installed on a 256MB partition, with complete X support, and Blackbox.

unrealer33 · 08-03-2003, 11:13 PM

Is that straight off the slack CD? Or did you recompile the kernel to how you wanted it? Once you get done with all your experimentation, LMK which distro you liked the best.

Are you going to run Freevo? Or, what are you planning on using for a frontend?

And which one did you think was faster, slack or Debian? I also am curious to find which will be the fastest booting

The Undertaker · 08-04-2003, 02:47 AM

Check out my favorite Carputer sites:
http://www.dashpc.com/
http://www.groomlakelabs.com/grandamp/index.html

SiGmA_X · 08-05-2003, 03:46 AM

Right off the CD. I am going to install again and compile kernel and all.

jospfh · 08-06-2003, 08:33 AM

Stripping a linux install (in short)

First of all, do an ‘expert’ install and try to keep it minimal.

Don’t install KDE or Gnome, they are BIG. Use a lighter/smaller one, fvwm, twm for instance. Offcourse don’t install any GUI stuff when not using a graphical screen.

Leave out any fancy stuff, you can always install it later.

Use a free partition. Create a filesystem on it. Make a new directory. Mount the partition. Create the linux root structure in it and use that to copy all your files to. This will be the root partition of your ‘new’distro.

Recompiling your kernel won’t bring you much. You should determine which kernel modules are needed and you should remove those that are not needed form /lib/modules/. You will discover that there are a lot of them….

Libraries. Make a list of all the executables your are going to use. Use ldd on each of them to determine which libraries your need. The rest can be left out. Libraries can be found in /lib/ and /usr/lib/ and in /usr/local/lib/.

Only copy the needed executables from /bin/, /sbin/, /usr/bin/, /usr/bin/, /usr/local/bin/ and /usr/local/sbin/.

Man pages and other installed documentation, throw it away and use google…

This is how I started, later I replaced standard executables by smaller ones: no bash but busybow, no login, getty but tinylogin. I also stripped glibc. Mor info at my website.

Hope this helps!

P.S. Maybe this is a very rude way to make your own distro but you will learn much of it.

SiGmA_X · 08-06-2003, 03:21 PM

That helps a lot for me! Thank you! I'll be giveing it a shot tonight.

Question tho. Once I have it all installed and my new sources compiled, can I remove things like g++/gcc/make/etc? I won't be needing them for runtime, right?