I have a dream.... (*nix)

[Seeruk]

I have a dream.... well more of a project I have given myself in a time of relative quiet at work 🙂

The Fixit Linux distro, based on Damn Small Linux, the ultimate utility OS to be carried around by all techies on their USB stick. My frustration stems from the fact that DSL lacks a lot of utilities for fixing stuff, Something a Knoppix scale would be better but without the unnecessary stuff and reducing its size considerably.

So the requirements are:

Total Size less than 256mb (1/4 of my current usb stick capacity)
Ability to boot the same image either from the bios, or within a Qemu emulator for Windows or within a Qemu emulator for *nix (tricky one!)
Removable of email clients, spreadsheet apps, and all other stuff useless from a tech's point of view
Addition of packages for tech's such as Qparted, Disk Recovery apps, Anti-Virus, example 'virgin' conf files, essential drivers etc
Addition of useful editing packages such as XML, C++, VB, HTML, PHP, JDK, with colour formatted text.
A custom app to hotswap net configuration such as simple IP addresses, or configure proxies (must work at all levels of the stack)
A wireless configuration tool that isnt complete and utter sh1t (yet to be found on any Distro I have found)
A light WM, flux that comes with DSL is OK, E17 fully integrated would be nicer 🙂
Auto mounting of all local partitions and drives even if 'unreadble'

Thats all for now 🙂 I have spent a few days trying to find a distro with even 50% of what I list and failed (Looked at DSL, trimmed down Slax, Puppy, and some ukranian one I forget the name of) so it looks like I may have to start from scratch with DSL and adding removing stuff as required, but if anyone knows of something better as a starting point I would appreciate it 🙂

Also the booting thing is a toughie, considering a box I am trying to fix could be in all kinds of states, I need it to be bootable from USB like a liveCD, I need it to be bootable from a desktop (win & *nix) using qemu's. All these are easy to do individually suing images that already exist, but how to get all 3 possibilities from one single image?? I really wish VMWare was truly portable as it would make life much easier!

Also nominations for good packages and utilities to include please 🙂

Wish me luck!

 

[Seeruk]

Something I forgot 🙂

Must be low system requirments... say 128mb-184mb of RAM

Actually been playing with the Austrumi a bit more (the ukranian one 🙂 ) and I am astonished at how fast this boots... think 50% of the boot time of DSL!

Its also very quick running in a VM with just 128mb allocated to it ...

 

[skyking]

booting from USB is usually available in new boxen, but I would not place all my eggs in that basket.
I'd craft a boot CD to carry along, for the machines that are hosed enough to not boot to the drive and incapable of booting to usb.
Then I'd mount the USB and go to work🙂

 

[Seeruk]

I know what you are saying, but if a box is *THAT* hosed I would probably take it home with me anyway where spare cables, parts, tools are available 🙂

Thing is 99% of the time I am called over on the spur of the moment, I don't carry a CD around with me 24/7 thus often wouldnt be armed with the required tools anyway. My pendrive is with me 24/7 thus the reason for the project 🙂

While I am here, anyone recommend an editor that isnt too large in size that does like every major scripting/programming language? I dont mean anything OO, just tag colouring, automatic indents etc. Beaver does some for example but no XML, some KDE thing I tried yesterday did some but not most of the ones Beaver does.

 

[kamper]

vi(m)

 

[Seeruk]

Originally posted by: kamper
vi(m)

OK I'll rephrase 🙂 Excluding VI(M) I hate it with a passion 🙂

I have changed base now to MiniKnoppix2005 as it is half the work done for me 🙂 Plus I found some decent scripts for customising it with the flexibility of apt-get its making the job very easy.

However the booting is still the real problem...

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
I know what you are saying, but if a box is *THAT* hosed I would probably take it home with me anyway where spare cables, parts, tools are available 🙂

That's funny... when my home computer is on the fritz, I take it up to my office where I have spare cables/drives/etc...

 

[Nothinman]

Addition of useful editing packages such as XML, C++, VB, HTML, PHP, JDK, with colour formatted text.

vim, of course.

Auto mounting of all local partitions and drives even if 'unreadble'

How are you supposed to mount an unreadable filesystem?

A custom app to hotswap net configuration such as simple IP addresses, or configure proxies (must work at all levels of the stack)

laptop-net, it's a bit of work to setup but you can have it do anything you want. Another option would be NetworkManager if you have X and want something GUI.

 

[Seeruk]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Auto mounting of all local partitions and drives even if 'unreadble'

How are you supposed to mount an unreadable filesystem?

There are a few data recovery tools out there that can do such a thing. I'm just no expert on them and not sure what the best is. I'm guessing something from a 'forensics' tree somewhere 🙂

A custom app to hotswap net configuration such as simple IP addresses, or configure proxies (must work at all levels of the stack)

laptop-net, it's a bit of work to setup but you can have it do anything you want. Another option would be NetworkManager if you have X and want something GUI.

Thx I'll take a look at them 🙂



I have 2 seperate builds going on now, one based on mini-knoppix and one on Austrumi. The MiniKnoppix will be a CD, the austrumi one much much lighter and qemu's on the USB.

 

[Nothinman]

There are a few data recovery tools out there that can do such a thing. I'm just no expert on them and not sure what the best is. I'm guessing something from a 'forensics' tree somewhere

They might be able to recover some data from the volume, but mounting it requires kernel support. I suppose you could use FUSE on Linux, but even then it would be error prone since you can't have any idea what data might be in the control structures of a corrupted disk.

Also, for the network configuration stuff, There's a chapter in the book "The Debian System" about network configuration and mentions some of the tools available in Debian to manage different aspects of the network configuration.