Bloody Stupid For Linux

This is the second pseudo-release of Bloody Stupid Linux, which of course has nothing to do with the first release. The first BSL was a 50Mb ISO Live run CD based on DamnSmall Linux.

I had a lot of fun hacking around DamnSmall, and apparently it drew a little attention. John, the lord master of DamnSmall, even was kind enough to link to me off of the DSL relatives page. I got a few mails, most about the image to the right, about a hundred downloads or so, and some of those were even people I didn't know.

This whole project started because I needed to cramb a kernel and a root filesytem onto a floppy. Not having enough room in the kernel for disk or filesystem support, I figured why not wget the modules, with the inevitable conclusion, why not wget a bigger root filesystem next?

Why go to all this trouble? The BSL kernel is basically a life support system for ram and network cards, since it wget's support for everything else on the machine the kernel is very small. The initial aim was to fit it on a single floppy, then PXE booting became attractive, and really, since the kernel doesn't need to support whatever it just booted from in order to have its root filesystem, its very flexible. Yeah, I know an initrd can do the same thing, but its more fun this way. As it stands, BSL makes for an excellent repair system, the framework for a bulk installer, a neat toy, and an alright thin client ( as long as you've got a gob of RAM handy.)

Most of all, this whole thing is incredibly hackable. If you wanted to use a different slackware image, just tar one up, name it image.tar.gz and stick it in the /bsl directory of your image web server. If you need that image to unpack to larger than 170Mb, hack up the init script in the cpio archive, rebuild the archive, then recompile the kernel... sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. Want to replace the whole image with Debian/SuSe/Fedora/Arch/DSL/Gentoo? Go to it!"