This is Part 2 of an ELJonline technical series about Brian's Own Embedded Linux (“BOEL”), a small embeddable Linux distribution that can boot from disk, CDROM, or the Net. Brian Finley developed BOEL as part of a project to create a tool for distributing live updates to client systems, which required that the client machines be booted in such a manner that their hard disks were not in use so that they… would be available for manipulation. Finley writes . . .

“In the first article, we went through the process of creating our initrd and discussed issues such as libraries, shells, filesystems and inodes. Much of our focus is on creating a system as small as possible — the complete BOEL system has to fit on a single 1.44MB floppy. In this article we go through the process of tying a kernel to our initrd and making the system bootable from a variety of media . . .”

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