[MLB-WIRELESS] Melbwireless Linux distro

[David Arnold]

-->"Jason" == Jason Hecker <jason at air.net.au> writes:

  Jason> Is anyone interested in working towards making a Linux
  Jason> distribution for Melbwireless?

<...>

  Jason> What say you all?

having recently put together a small router box, i think it's a
reasonable thing to do.  cutting enough stuff out of debian to get it
into a flash card was painful.

but rather than coming at it from a redhat vs. debian vs. slackware
perspective, perhaps we should start by thinking about the properties
such a distribution would need?

like (as suggestions):
- reasonable security focus
- automatic or very easy patching/upgrades
- able to run from read-only media (flash card)
- small filesystem (cheap flash cards, floppy/ls120/zip)
- net bootable? (tftp/bootp/dhcp)
- run from RAM disc (keep any rotating media idle)
- simple config for one or more of
  - route/serve downstream private network
  - route/serve downstream public access network
  - point-to-point uplink (one or more)
  - point-to-point downlink (one or more)
- access control (for public access network) ?
- stats collection and reporting (for melbwireless web) ?
- remote management
- remote logging ?
- support for x86 (PCs), 68k (old macs), PPC (newer macs)
- serial console support

then we could start looking at software it would need to run and
choosing the OS.  it might turn out we're better off running a BSD, a
busybox-based userland, or whatever.

jason's point about enabling package preparation on popular platforms
is reasonable, but that might not require the wireless dist to have a
standard Linux dist as a base.





d

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