Booting Your Business Card: Linux-BBC 2.1

I have to admit, I have a bit of a
fascination with small Linuxes. So when my usual troll of Freshmeat
revealed that Linux-BBC released a new version, naturally I had to
try it. Now, small is a relative term; at 48MB, Linux-BBC actually
is medium-sized amongst small distributions. The spectrum of the
category ranges from miniwoody, at 180MB, to any of the various
things that fit on a single 1.44MB floppy.That said, there's a lot here; Linux-BBC is a combination
system administrator's triage disc and portable
workstation-on-a-CD. At bootup, the first thing I noticed was a
copy of Memtest86 3.0. It boots straight from ISOLINUX and is a
handy way to see if the boot crash you're getting is due to bad
memory. I was happy to see they're using V3.0; not only does this
version not have the 2GB RAM limit, it also handily tells you what
chipset is on the motherboard. The latter attribute can make things
a little less mysterious when you're dealing with a machine for the
first time.Rebooting into character mode, I started poking around. The
hard drive partitions are mounted automatically at bootup as
read-only under the /mnt/discs directory. Unlike Red Hat's system
administration disc, Linux-BBC doesn't make any assumptions about
what partitions go where. It simply mounts everything as
/mnt/discs/discN/partM, where N and M are the logical disc number
and partition number, respectively. It may be mildly annoying to
remount everything into a tree on a simple system, but for an
überhacker's multiboot, shared-partition box, this
works.Setting up networking was a breeze. I ran
trivial-net-setup; it autoprobed my tulip card,
asked me whether I wanted DHCP (I did), ran dhcpcd as a dæmon
and I was on the Net. For the console types,
links,
screen,
ncftp and
GPM are all available. Sorry,
there's no full-out Emacs, but
nano,
pico and
joe are available for those who
like that sort of thing. For those in the opposite camp, Vim fills
the role.A number of other tools are present on Linux-BBC that I
wouldn't expect to find on a mini-Linux distribution, including
dc,
wc and
less. These are the types of
things you don't think about not having on a
normal Linux setup, but items you wouldn't find in, say, tomsrtbt.
There are no man pages, however. Linux-BBC is very much a "we
expect you to know what you're doing" kind of distribution. After
all, you can run screen, ssh out
to a working system, read the fine manual and cut-and-paste code
back into the local host.You say the network isn't working? Oh, that must be why /sbin
has a number of Ethernet diagnostic binaries hanging around, from
things as common as the ne2k and eepro100 to some of the more
obscure types, such as alta and yellowfin. Impressive.
Fscks are present for everything
common (that Linux can write to): the
isovfy tool from the cdrecord
suite, minicom for checking your modem, LVM tools, a couple
different varieties of fdisk...at this point the little grey cells
began to boggle, so it was time to see if X worked.Because my poor aging peepers can't read normal text at 1280
x 1024, even on a 19" screen, I fired up the 1024 x 768 framebuffer
mode on reboot. After logging in, I ran startx, which came up in a
hurry (having run discover during the boot process) with an xterm,
an rxvt (so you'd have your choice) and a small clock.
Right-clicking revealed a menu tree that includes the ability to
configure Hackedbox, a window manager to do "sloppy focus". That
is, focus follows the mouse but stays in the last window moused if
the cursor goes to the root window. It's handy to keep the cursor
out of the way, yet not have to click to type in a window. Other
choices included terminals, the BrowseX Tcl/Tk-based browser,
Ethereal, a few games and the workspace list. The workspace list
also can be accessed with the middle button. After using BrowseX a
while, I found it to be fast, light and capable of rendering
complex pages quickly and correctly. I might write more about this
browser at a later date.A few non-Linux but related tools are included on the CD as
well, including copies of PuTTY and PSCP for Windows. One could use
these in conjunction with sshd from Linux-BBC to help rescue a
machine, but don't forget to give root a password before trying to
log in from remote. It won't work if you don't, and it politely
tells you as much when you start sshd. Windows copies of rawrite
for both DOS and Win32 are provided, so you can make a boot floppy
for those machines that won't boot ISOLINUX, along with .exe files
for tar and gzip.I didn't see a copy of GRUB lurking about, though I did see
LILO. This isn't a big deal, though; under most circumstances one
needs to edit grub.conf or use the GRUB binary kept on the
underlying system. You do have to crank up GPM, the portmapper (for
NFS mounts), sshd and thttpd every time, unless you hack the
disc--an entirely reasonable thing to do if you've gotten this far.
I also didn't see a GUI CD burner program, though cdrecord is
available.All of these really are minor annoyances, however; the idea
of being able to walk up to J. Random PC and have this much Linux
goodness in something wallet-sized is worth it. I might actually
have to find some business card CD-Rs specifically for this
purpose. I don't think they would hold up too well in a wallet, but
it sure would get clients' attention to hand them something with
your name on it that was useful for more than scratch paper once
the print on the front is transcribed. And these CDs would go well
in the business card slot in a laptop or palmtop case. In addition,
nothing prevents you from using a more standard form factor for the
physical media; the 3.5" (180MB) minidisc size often works where
something squared off does not. Whatever you put it on, it's a
whole lot of bang for 48MB worth of bandwidth bucks. Score
Linux-BBC a 9.5 in-category.Linux-BBC 2.1 is available from
www.lnx-bbc.org. It is
GPLed as an anthology, but the individual packages carry their own
licenses.Coming Up: Last week, we
said Glenn's next article would be about low-noise cooling
components as tested on our Ultimate Linux Box (ULB) test-bed
machine. Unfortunately, it didn't arrive in time for Glenn to do
the testing and write today's article. Next week, though, we're
back on track with the ULB.Glenn Stone is a Red Hat
Certified Engineer, sysadmin, technical writer, cover model and
general Linux flunkie. He has been hand-building computers for fun
and profit since 1999, and he is a happy denizen of the Pacific
Northwest.

email: liawol.org!gs