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Saoshyant
October 17th, 2004, 22:54
I would like to know if that idea of compiling a Linux distribution only for Dreamcast Development went any where at all.

If not I would like to encourage such act from the community's *nix experts as it would help a lot on bringing some standard to the field and would not cause so much trouble when compiling the toolchains and such.

Please tell me all what you think and what has been done or it is planned to be done.

OneThirty8
October 18th, 2004, 00:11
I thought somebody had said they made a Morphix remaster when we talked about it at DCEmulation.com a while back. I personally think the idea of a version that will run from some sort of removable media would be pretty neat - that way, you wouldn't have to touch your hard drive if you use Windows and don't want to try and partition your drive, and could keep the source code and compiled binaries for your projects on a Zip or flash drive. It could be a major pain in the butt to set it all up, though. I had seriously thought about it at one point, but I never tried to actually make a just-for-DCDev distro like that.

BlackAura
October 18th, 2004, 01:11
The major problem is trying not to let it get too big. The DC toolchain is actually pretty small, but the rest of the system could be quite large.

The smallest you could probably get away with would be the base system (kernel, init, system tools, GNU tools), development tools (make, native toolchain, Dreamcast toolchain, KOS), and a text editor. That'd be approximately the same as a Cygwin install, and it'd probably be a little larger.

If you wanted to go all the way with it, you could add X, a window manager, an IDE, automatic hardware detection, internet connection tools, a web browser, and all kinds of other stuff. It could easily grow to fill an entire CD.

Doing a complete distribution just for DC development is pointless. It'd be far easier, for example, to provide packages for normal distributions. However, a version that runs on removable media, or can be installed on a Windows-formatted hard drive would be much more useful.

I think that a complete development system would be too large to fit on a USB flash drive or a Zip disk, no matter how you try to compress it. A really basic system could probably fit on a Zip disk or a 128MB flash drive, but it'd be difficult to get anything useful on there. So that leaves us with three options:

1 - Full Linux distribution. Bad idea, and it'd be easier to just make packages for other distributions.

2 - LiveCD. Probably the best solution.

3 - Image file that runs off a Windows-formatted hard drive. Should be basically identical to the LiveCD image file, so we can do both without too much difficulty.

A LiveCD that can be installed to a Windows partition is probably the best way. You can simply put the required files on the Windows formatted partition, either NTFS or FAT. All that changes is the boot process. For Win95 and Win98, we can create an icon that exits to DOS mode, and runs Linux using loadlin.exe (that's how I used to boot SuSE years ago). WinME would probably require a boot disk, or a registry hack to enable DOS mode. Windows 2000 or XP should be able to use Grub, and add an entry to C:\BOOT.INI to boot Linux.

None of those install/boot methods pose any risk to the Windows system. They're a little clunky, but they should work.

Saoshyant
October 18th, 2004, 13:54
Well then :) Live CD project anyone?