Apparently, though unproven, at 00:02 on Thursday 25 November 2010, Grant Edwards did opine thusly:
> I need to build a liveCD that boots on as wide a variety of hardware > as is practical. It needs to load one custom kernel module and then > run one console-mode application. Instead of building something from > scratch, I was hoping I might be able to modify an existing liveCD. > > There's no need for support for networking, graphics, or even access > to optical or hard drives. > > The current version of this CD is built sort of from scrach using a > labor-intensive and error-prone process. However, it does produce > something that's small (less that 10MB), and boots fast (around 10 > seconds). But, updating the existing CD with a newer kernel (to gain > support for newer hardware) is difficult. > > I thought about using a customized systemrescuecd, but that takes ages > to boot (almost 5 minutes). This CD is intended as something a > customer can run to do a quick hardware test, and making them sit > there for 5 minutes to see a 5-second test just isn't going to fly. > > I also looked at the gentoo minimal install CD, but that's still > pretty slow (3-4 minutes), and it's not at all obvious how to add a > kernel module to it. > > Does anybody have an recommendations for a good way to build a small > liveCD with a custom kernel module? damn small linux pretty generic, comes in at under 50M -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
