Boiling Down Slackware Linux to the Essentials? 9
noxious420 asks: "I need to crank out a large number of very basic Slackware based Linux boxes. I am familiar with the "canned" distribution sets that FreeBSD uses and I want to use a set similar to the "Minimal" - "The smallest configuration possible" set. In Slackware's Expert install mode, I have been able to boil it down to the very bare essentials that it needs to run, but there are some unused and leftover directories that I had to manually delete. I don't want to clean up these directories every time. Is there some way to get a true "minimal" Slackware install? "
Slackware packages (Score:2)
images (Score:1)
_joshua_
Hmmm... (Score:3)
Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! (Score:1)
Re:DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! (Score:1)
What makes win32 pickier is the driver revisions. Linux drivers are generally written to support all versions of a piece of hardware since the drivers aren't shipped with the devices.
The only major thing with this type of mirror, though, is you will have to reconfigure the network info to prevent fights between machines.
Re:DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! (Score:2)
The best way that I can think of to do this would make a simple tar ball like joshua said. Then on initial bootup have init run a shell script instead of the /etc/rc.d stuff. In this shell script you would set the host name and IP and that's about it. once that is completed write the config to disk and change /etc/inittab to run as normal and you are installed.
Re:images (Score:3)
To get a target machine to the point where you can mount a CD and run dump, I suggest checking out some of the linux floppy distributions.
There is one other option. There used to be a web site that offered you all the choices offered in RedHat's install script, and then created a custom install floppy which would automatically install according to those specifications, no human intervention necessary. So you could just go to this site (or it's equivalent for slack or whatever other distribuiton you want, or download whatever tool the site is running and use it yourself) and then make a boot install disk and just shove it and the cdrom in every machine. I think the boot floppy/dump from cdrom method will work faster.
simple. (Score:1)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2)
This works well. We rolled out a butttload of Linux and Win95/98 machines like this. I've done 'recovery CD's' for Win95/98 w/ this method, too. (Gee-- isn't that misuse of a GPL'd operating system and tools... *grin*) If you can swing it, a bootable CD makes it even handier-- albeit if you have to get into the BIOS to make the machine boot off of CD, the time-savings is negligable over just booting off floppy.
As a more ambitious project, we made a little bootdisk w/ dhcpcd and support for the NIC's in the machines we were using, and used a little program called 'netpipe' to broadcast out .tar's to PC's hard disks over the wire. It _rocked_ to see 150+ machines pulling an image simultaneously at 800KB+ a second on garden variety 10Base-T.