My router project is the idea of running Gentoo Linux as main home gateway, on an embedded-like system (not really embedded since it’s a Celeron 2.80GHz), without Portage installed in the runtime system, and without some part of the so-called system (that I still think should be reduced).
While there are still lots of minor details I haven’t even started looking into yet, there are a few things that already started being fixed up, for instance last week I cracked down on packages that don’t set RDEPEND/DEPEND properly (hostapd was in that list and I needed it).
Today one more little fix entered the tree that was required by my router: glibc no longer rutnime-depend on binutils; or rather it does no longer need to. Previously the nscd (name service cache daemon) init script used the strings command to find out the pid file to use for each start and stop request. Since the file does not change on disk after the build, at least 2.10.1 now checks for the pidfile at install time and then replace it in the init script. Dropping the dependency.
Now I got to say that the router is working mostly fine, so I don’t think I’ll be tinkering with it for a while, at least until I get the entropy key and I’ll start packaging the ekeyd daemon. This is also due to the fact that I have to reduce the time employed in that to return to work and other more important Gentoo things. This does not mean I’ll abandon the idea of fixing the system set so that it can be vastly reduced.
Hopefully I’ll be able to entangle enough between my normal Gentoo work and the router-specific work in the future. In the mean time, I’m happy to accept gifts (especially useful stuff like the testing strips — the Italian health service only pass me 50 strips every three months, which is less than one test a day) and kudos to prod me on continuing pursuing all free software work I have scheduled.
maybe can be interesting (or maybe not): http://code.google.com/p/gn…
Hi!I’ve been reading your posts and find most of them very interesting. I’m a bit obsessed when it comes to slimming down stuff, so I think minimizing system is an interesting idea. I don’t have enough insight in the internal workings of the portage system to know for sure, but couldn’t this be solved somehow with a few “+minimal” flags in the core packages? Or maybe have an embedded flag. As I understand it, system isn’t really an ebuild, so this might not be possible to do it this way.
hello,i have a replacement for the entropy key, which you can build yourself. it uses rs232 and is based on the same principle as the entropy key. i use it under ubuntu and all test i’ve made show an entropy which is or is in close proximity to one (never measured less than 0.99999 bits of entropy per read bit) and passes all fips test as well as the dieharder test. i use the rngd daemon to check the numbers and fill my kernel entropy pool. the project is located at: http://www.kielnet.net/home… — it’s in german, but using the translate function by google it should be understandable. the device driver “XR232random” (open source) is linked at the end of the page – i hope they fixed the compile problems with newer kernel versions in the actual version 1.1.0 (i’m using the old one 1.0.5 – never touch a runing system)if you have questions then post it here…cu tobias