Project #28, Install a CRUX Linux system for i386

Friday, April 17th, 2009 @ 1:02 pm | Projects

So awhile back, I tried building the CRUX Linux ISO on Crunchbang. While I abandoned the effort on Crunchbang, I did not abandon the ideas behind CRUX Linux. I’m pretty fired up about taking the theoretical CS training in operating systems and get into the meat of the Linux Kernel and how a distro is built using the Linux Kernel. I believe Arch Linux and CRUX lend themselves well to getting under the hood. By default, CRUX is not easy. Nor is Arch. CRUX takes it a step further. You have to set up your own disk partitions, and you get to configure and build your own kernel too. No big deal if you know the principles of disk paritions, understand fdisk, disk geometry, and the kernel build process. The hardest thing I find is knowing the right choices to make when deciding your disk partitions. There are some rules of thumb to follow, but otherwise there is a lot of personal preference in how to proceed beyond swap and root.

So most people will stop before passing go. Why even bother with this if you have Ubuntu or Deb? It’s simple. You’ll never learn how it works if you don’t get under the hood. Yes, you can get under the hood with Deb or Ubuntu. But not by default. Ubuntu is now about as polished as a windows install, and it generally makes recommendations and suggest defaults when you don’t yourself know what to do. So preimise one is that you can’t learn when the complexity is hidden.

The other argument is fat. Ubuntu is a release train like Windows. There is a question of legacy support and migration of users at the fore of any new release. And there is the question of what to add to the new release to make it useful and interesting. I would say that Ubuntu and some of the other richer Desktop Linux distros have a lot of extra stuff they come with that you don’t need, not if you know your hardware in advance and know what you do.

So like Arch, CRUX let’s you configure the packages you need from the beginning. There is a great article on how to strip it down further to get a 16 second load time with CRUX on a Thinkpad (WOW)! My Ubuntu takes a couple minutes to load. Even my Arch takes about 45 seconds to load. Windows takes 5 minutes ;)

So how did it go? Well, I got through it in about 4 hours. Your root partition has to be big enough to store the initial install of CRUX, obviously. I messed that up the first time. Also, your filesystem type used in your partiions may have an influence on the partition sizes. I stuck with ext2. I messed something up, either in the Lilo config or in my partitioning scheme. So I do need to start over. That’s ok. I picked up some more KNOWLEDGE. That’s what life is about! I learned that your SATA drives show up as /dev/sd* while your regular IDE drives show up as /dev/hd*. I configured and built my second kernel (first was on Linux Mint to add USB Gadget support). I’m going to try this again in a few weeks when I have some time.