On Sat, 28 Dec 2002, Andy Ball wrote:

>
>Hello Christian,
>
>   CS> You could easily get an X terminal in under 50MB.
>     > Stick the fonts on a server, add some swap space and
>     > you'd be set for an X terminal on a 110MB Zip drive.
>
>As I mentioned to Brian, I won't be trying that on this
>particular machine.  That said, I'm interested in knowing
>what's involved.
>
>For example: is it practical to build an X terminal from a
>machine with just read-only media (say a CD-ROM drive)?  How
>much of the filesystem could be mounted read-only and what
>would need to be copied to a RAM disk?

There was an interesting talk at the recent european BSD conference in 
Amsterdam, on NFS based NetBSD installations, using shared root 
filesystems. The paper can be had from:
http://2002.eurobsdcon.org/papers/souvatzis.pdf
http://2002.eurobsdcon.org/papers/souvatzis_presentation.ps

In brief, the talk covered what could and could not be stored read-only, 
where to use MFS. It transpired that what couldn't be used read-only can 
simply be union-mounted with MFS filesystems, avoiding the wastage of 
conventional ram disks.

The author was somewhat coy about releasing the scripts he used, but the 
paper and presentation should provide you with a reasonable starting 
point to look at implementing your own system.

>
>- Andy Ball.
>

-- 
"I've started referring to the proposed action against Iraq as Desert
Storm 1.1, since it reminds me of a Microsoft upgrade: it's expensive,
most people aren't sure they want it, and it probably won't work." 
-- Kevin G. Barkes

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