[cobalt-developers] Re: "We only use the RaQ hardware, and put a totally differentunix distribution on it."

[Niels Poppe <niels@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Andrea Smith <ann@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I'm interested in hearing more about this as I would love to do the same to
> my Raq2.  What distribution of unix did you put on your Raq and did you
> have difficulty making it work with the hardware?
> 
Here is a short story about it. In case you're still interested after
having read this, contact us again. We still haven't really decided
whether we should make the investment to publish all of this.
If there is any chance other people would contribute to this bare-bones
cobaltnix project, we probably will.

We have (once again :) built ourselves a linux distribution based on
both
redhat and cobalt packages, leaving out anything that isn't needed for a
core unix server box. On top of that, application packages can be
installed
again to provide services like apache, ssh, ldap, sendmail, whatever.

The most minimal installation boots off a root filesystem taking less
than
10Mb of diskspace, uses ramdisks on /etc and /var to keep the real
filesystem
read-only, and can also boot from nfs or netboot via bootp and dhcp.

It wasn't really difficult to make things work on Cobalt/mips, but we
did have
to patch the kernel to get the ramdisk device working.