[rescue] OS Thoughts (Was Re: Transplanting a Sun Fire V210 motherboard - PSU requirements?)

[John Floren]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 8:25 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
> On 27 Feb 2013, at 23:19, William Barnett-Lewis <wlewisiii at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:50 PM,  <rescue-request at sunhelp.org> wrote:
>>
>> Some interesting thoughts on OS design.
>>
>> I've been pondering getting a Raspberry Pi mainly to play with various
>> OS's that are on it (swap out a SD chip, have a new world). One
>> project that I'd like to try is stripping down the linux distro to the
>> minimum so that all it is is the FEP for a copy of Brad Parker's CADR
>> lisp machine emulator. While it will hardly be fast by today's
>> standards, I'd bet it would still put an LM-2 to shame :)
>>
>> I'm also amused by the fact that Plan 9 runs on it. That would be
>> interesting to play with as well.
>
> Plan 9 runs on it?  Nice!
>

Plan 9 actually runs quite well--it's the easiest, cheapest way to try
Plan 9, plus you'll know that the hardware is compatible (always a
problem with Plan 9)

As for stripping down a Linux distro, we've had success using
debootstrap to create an absolute minimum root filesystem. You can
then jam it into an initrd like we did, or maybe nfs mount it. We keep
things extra simple by writing our own init--it's just a 10-line shell
script.


john