Does this work ? - Knoppix for a production environment -

hello knoppix community,

i need your advice in a project for my company. i don't kow if it will actually work so i need you feedback before i start to do anything.

the situation is as following:

i need a small linux version with arround 20 mbyte or less for a special linux pc diagnostic environment in our pc factory. currently all is done by dos and a 1,44mb floppy. the client start from that bootfloppy log into our testservers (a novell server) and run severall batch-skripts to start a dos pc diagnostic program. the problem which is came up that dos support for most pc components like sound cards, network cards, mainboard chipsets etc is running out. the aftereffect of this problem is that we have no driver support for most actual pc hardware and we can't test our new build/factured pc's.

i got the idea to transfer the whole diagnostic from a dos environment to a linux environment. there are pc disgnostic programm's for linux but we need a basic linux detect the whole hardware and load all neccesesary drivers for each pc. the knoppix hardware for detection is fantastic.

1.)
is there a way to merge knoppix down to a bunch of some mbyte's to get it on a small usbstick with full driver support like on a knoppix 3.7 live cd? i do not need any xwindow system or any user application. just a nice kernel and huge driver support?

2.)
can i load the knoppix image via a dos with loadlin.exe from a server ? (the networkconnection is established via dos in this case)


there are a lot of work to do but my knwoledge in linux is not as quarter as good.
thanks a lot for your answers! ideas and suggestions welcome !

best regards, tobias (germany)

this whole thing should be possible to accomplish. hmm.
perhaps a remastered damn small linux CD, but that is 50Mb...
if you remaster DSL and put a resent Kernel in i think much of your work is done.
then perhaps you could cut away the X environment and some servers, software...
a 20Mb environment should be possible.

OH and the CD is bootable so... not much need for loadlin. if it is not OLD hardware. like p1 133Mhz with 16Mb ram and such.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kleiner_Drache

is there a way to merge knoppix down to a bunch of some mbyte's to get it on a small usbstick with full driver support like on a knoppix 3.7 live cd? i do not need any xwindow system or any user application. just a nice kernel and huge driver support?

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Well, there is some limit, but you can easily get it down to 100 MB while keeping all important admin tools.
Like my little admin remaster: http://debian.christian-leber.de/racd/racd-0.1.iso (98 MB)

But that should not matter, space is virtually free.

If it matters for some stupid reason, yes of course it's possible to trim a linux to 20 MB, but space is mostly cheaper than caring for it.

I have bigger problems with the USB part, because you have to get it booting, afaik usb booting is all but reliable, that's no
linux problem, when you can get the kernel and it's initrd to memory it will work.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kleiner_Drache

can i load the knoppix image via a dos with loadlin.exe from a server ? (the networkconnection is established via dos in this case)

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also possible, you don't actually need knoppix for this, it's easier to just use some debian

but using dos is a waste of time, you could netboot the boxes in another way (how, that depends)

If every testbox has a cd-rom, just use a cd-rom.
If all have a floppy drive use a grub boot floppy with net support.


Christian Leber

What type of diagnostics do you need to run?

You could make a small remaster as mentioned above and include things like- cpuburn, lucifer, bonnie++, memtest, and mprime (prime95). These would test pretty much everything but the video, and no network access would be needed.