There is a new section on NetAdminTools, now, called GIAGD. In this section we will configure a system based on uClibc. Now, we aren’t planning on updating the system beyond what is needed, so we will probably be staying with the uClibc root filesystem as of March 01, 2003. There are newer versions out there, but most likely the procedures in this section will work the same with the newer root filesystems.

Primarily, we will use the GIAGD system for our homebrew section. As we customize the GIAGD system for our needs, we will document the tweaks here. Many of the techniques are very applicable to disaster recovery and general GNU/Linux systems administration and maintenance.

We installed GIAGD on Housey, our computer hooked up above our electronics bench, since this is the machine most of the homebrew stuff gets run on. Now, uClibc is meant, primarily, to be used in embedded systems. Does this picture of housey count Housey as an embedded system. 🙂 Yeah, we are short on space, and there was a nice little spot next to the heating duct. We booted using the zip/linload method from this article, and moved the filesystem from the zip disk to our hard disk using the method from this article.

Our first tweaks were to get the floppy device working with our kernel. We used:

cd /dev
mknod fd0 b 2 0
mknod fd0u1440 b 2 28

We also added GPM and VIM. We went with GPM version 1.20.0 available here, and VIM version 5.3, available here. VIM 6.1 did not compile correctly, and it looked like it was a glibc issue, so we just tried an earlier (and smaller!) version. One catch with the earlier versions of VIM is that you need to put syntax on in your .vimrc file, rather than syntax enable. Besides that, all works fab. We are up to 73 megs so far.

Next, we’ll go over the startup scripts.