For a newbie (looks to be the intended audience of the article), this gives them a working foundation to start from. They can get progressively more involved with whatever part of Linux they desire, as their experience grows.
i think i disabled everything i could think of in the kernel (including filesystem support, which was quickly rectified) for a truly 'minimalist' experience.
it ofcourse didnt do much but it was very responsive.
u-root is mentioned in the article -- I used buildroot and busybox for embedded Linux development while in university: https://buildroot.org/
This tutorial gets straight to the heart of the matter. Get a system that boots asap and then add complexity as you discover the shortcomings.
This seems like a much better pedagogical approach for someone not sure how the kernel works or what initramfs is, etc…
It was kind of fun, but I have absolutely no desire to do it again. I tried running it as my "full time" distro but what I ended up with was something extremely fragile and decidedly not fun for me to use.
Nowadays I run a NixOS Minimal install, which is about the level of operating system that I like to work in.
Charmingly, the "modern" process doesn't seem wholly dissimilar. I would echo the comments of one of the sibling comments here: Targeting this to RPi would be fun and educational. Maybe I'll give it a try.
I have my own toy init, shell and other utilities. The GNU coreutils are included for debugging.
My current focus is on drawing windows onto the framebuffer.
The latter can be done by booting into another distro and kexec'ing into your own kernel and performing the Installation afterward from memory. See also nixos-anywhere for a practical implementation of this
In the past I've used a script called "alpine-make-vm-image" to run alpine images in digital ocean.
https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-make-vm-image
(Maybe that script does some magic to make booting a droplet directly from the image possible. On that I plead ignorance :)
SomeHacker44•3mo ago