Well, it's official. I have just completed remastering NCLB Linux to a DSL base. When you start over from scratch, you realize how much tweaking you have done in the past! I hope to wait quite awhile until have to start from scratch again! I used DSL version 0.9.1 as my remaster base so I hope nothing TOO COOL happens to the DSL base in the next several releases. :)
All my installs will be from frugal. I have made alot of little modifications to make the OS specific to my cause so many things are 'hard-coded' into the OS like having to have an /hda1 and /hda5 partition. At first I tried to avoid that but then again I knew I was only using this remaster for one specific purpose so I decided to take that route. Basically the image and backup.tar.gz will reside on hda1 while a data partion will reside on /hda5. I added commands to bootlocal so that a 'MyDocumnents' folder is created in /home/dsl, permissioned to dsl staff and mounted in fstab on /hda5. I also documented all the configuration files from all the apps that are created in /home/dsl and added them to filetool.lst so any personal settings/game scores/etc can be saved and restored. I have tried to automate as much as possible because I know that other NFP's like mine will be interested in this software and I want to try and minimize the learning curve for them to install.
I used many extensions in the remaster which will help me if I ever want to remaster from a different base of DSL later on. One thing I had to do was move extensions that were in /opt to another place in the fs. /opt is loaded into RAM and this killed the distro on 32 and 64mb machines. I was able to move almost everything to /usr/local/bin so I was able to test the "Lite" version on a P133 w/32mb ram successfully.
Just for fun, I timed Abiword on the P133 just to guage performance. On first open, it took 1 min and 20 sec.!! On the second open, it was 25 sec. Still slow but respectable. It is so fun to see you can get all this software to run on these old machines. Games and such work pretty well on the old machines also.
I am anxious to see what can be done with squashfs on these old machines once Fordi finishes testing. If it works well, I may be remastering again sooner than I expected!
Linux has been so much fun for me and I just want to say THANK YOU ROBERTS for frugal!! It is going to be the backbone for the success of mine and other NFP organizations in the future....just wait and see.