Question:
I've used hard hat, and am pretty pleased with it, although they seem to have
discontinued their journeyman CD. If this is truly a off the shelf PC you are
using though, why not just go with a Red Hat or simmilar distribution, and
strip/customize it to fit your needs?
Answer:
I should have clarified. Its not a PC. Its a PC mother board with
Flash Disk.
So stripping Red Hat is out of question (I think the minimal for Red
Hat will be in the region of about 250MB or so).
I've successfully pressed RedHat onto a flash-disk with only 8Mb and
still had plenty of space for my application, so it's not at all out
of the question.
You have to carefully select _only_ the parts you need, strip the
debugging info from the libs etc.
If it's really worth the effort is a different story.
It's not that much effort. There are enough examples how to do it.
Just look at all the "Linux on a floppy" projects.
We've done one x86 configuration for our SELF (Simple Embedded Linux
Framework, see ftp://ftp.denx.de/pub/LinuxPPC/usr/src/SELF/) and it
was more or less trivial.
The resulting ramdisk image needs less than 740 kB. Add the kernel
image (< 520 kB) and you'll need about 1.2 MB of flash memory for the
whole system.
No special "embedded distribution" is needed when you know what you
need. The only thing these packages are good in is providing tools
that can be used to create similar configurations. It's basicly the
old question if you prefer a CLI or a GUI...
