3) What kind of basic utils will you want? I use busybox, so you can
check out their site as to what is available, but I can also compile
some stuff on my own (though space is limited of course) provided the
app can be compiled against uClibc fairly easily.
We were thinking about using read-only IDE flash disks for these Linux
cash registers. Far more reliable than floppies, and probably more
reliable than hard drives because there are no moving parts. (Some of
the cash register locations had problems with overheatig.) We can buy
sizes anywhere between 4MB-several GB so there is a lot of flexibility
in what we can do. We need to figure out what size of smallest flash
disks we would need to buy without detracting from effectiveness. The
flash disks should also leave some room to grow should we think of new
useful features to add to the system later.
I'm having trouble fitting everythign in a 1.5MB floppy image (600k
kernels don't help here...), and SSH (even a stripped down one) is
putting me over by about 100k. I can go for 4MB and that *should* give
me sufficient space to do whatever I need (including the tinyX server)
if I stick with uClibc. However, if I can go up to 32MB space (I can
compress this if I have to in order to get it down to size, but that
shouldn't be a problem, they do this on 16MB iPaqs after all :), I can
easily get glibc on there, eliminating the need to carefully go about
choosing apps that are compatibile with the stripped down libc. I
wouldn't even have to use busybox then as space wouldn't be nearly a
concern (did you know busybox statically linked to uclibc can fit a
mostly functional linux system into under 600k?).
I'm also making some "demo disks" that do the NFS root fs and tftp
loading an image into a ramdisk that are coming along nicely.
--MonMotha
