Linux Journal: Booting Your Business Card: Linux-BBC 2.1

“I have to admit, I have a bit of a fascination with small
Linuxes. So when my usual troll of Freshmeat revealed that
Linux-BBC released a new version, naturally I had to try it. Now,
small is a relative term; at 48MB, Linux-BBC actually is
medium-sized amongst small distributions. The spectrum of the
category ranges from miniwoody, at 180MB, to any of the various
things that fit on a single 1.44MB floppy.

“That said, there’s a lot here; Linux-BBC is a combination
system administrator’s triage disc and portable
workstation-on-a-CD. At bootup, the first thing I noticed was a
copy of Memtest86 3.0. It boots straight from ISOLINUX and is a
handy way to see if the boot crash you’re getting is due to bad
memory. I was happy to see they’re using V3.0; not only does this
version not have the 2GB RAM limit, it also handily tells you what
chipset is on the motherboard. The latter attribute can make things
a little less mysterious when you’re dealing with a machine for the
first time.

“Rebooting into character mode, I started poking around. The
hard drive partitions are mounted automatically at bootup as
read-only under the /mnt/discs directory. Unlike Red Hat’s system
administration disc, Linux-BBC doesn’t make any assumptions about
what partitions go where. It simply mounts everything as
/mnt/discs/discN/partM, where N and M are the logical disc number
and partition number, respectively. It may be mildly annoying to
remount everything into a tree on a simple system, but for an
überhacker’s multiboot, shared-partition box, this
works…”

Complete
Story