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Date:      Wed, 23 Apr 2003 20:05:07 +0200
From:      "Rodrigo Readi" <scire@web.de>
To:        freebsd-small@freebsd.org
Subject:   <no subject>
Message-ID:  <200304231805.h3NI57q04071@mailgate5.cinetic.de>

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Dear Sirs!

I am new to FreeBSD, and much more to this list, that I found nice
because it seemed to be small. I hope my first questions are not too
trivial.

I would like to make a bootable floppy with a small kernel, with /etc,
minimal provisory bin and sbin. The kernel should have some few
drivers and support NFS client for having the resources in bin, sbin
and other directories in a server on a local ethernet, as well as
/home. The idea is to give this floppy to some windoze users in order
that they taste FreeBSD without altering anything in their hard
disks. Later I will try to do it in the normal way, booting from the
net, but I want to try first with this "small bsd" concept and would
thank you for any suggestion. Since I also want to learn how to adapt
normal FreeBSD to specific purposes, I would preffer not to use
PicoBSD, closedbsd and other small distributions.

Today I did the following with a floppy:

fdformat fd0 disklabel -B -w fd0 fd1440 newfs fd0a

And this seemed to be enough to make a bootable floppy searching for
"/kernel". Isn't fdisk necessary? Isn't "/boot/mbr" necessary? Are
"/boot/boot1" and /boot/boot2" enough? With what is filled the sector
0 of the floppy? Where does normally go the files given with -b and -s
in disklabel?

If I want to have the kernel compressed as "/kernel.gz", do I need
"/boot/loader"? I noted that ClosedBSD has it and decompress.

I have also some general questions. A floppy has 80 cylinders, 2
heads, 18 sectors per track and 512 bytes per sector. Multiplying all
these numbers and dividing by 1024 I get exactly 1440. Where is the
boot sector? Is it one of these 2880=80*2*18 sectors? Or does a floppy
has 1440+515K?

An how are the cylinders, heads and sectors in a track numerated?
beginning from 0 or from 1? It is clear from the manual that when
fdisk asks for the size of the slice, it is the number of sectors, but
what should be the entry for the beginning of the slice? The number of
the first sector in it? Counted beginning from 0 or from 1?

The command "disklabel -B -w fd0 fd1440" generated three partitions:
a, b, c, all of the same size of the fd. I wanted that for a, and this
is usual for c, but not for c: how do I make it of size 0?

I also noted in ClosedBSD that they tar and compress "/etc" and that
they used ""/sbin/tar -xzf" in "/etc/rc" for recover it. Is this a
specially small version of tar? Where do I find small utilities for
small bsds?

Thanks, 
Rodrigo 
scire_AT_web_DOT_de


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