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From: liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux
Subject: Re: Few simple A/UX questions
Message-ID: <2771@sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Sep 90 11:20:30 GMT
References: <1990Sep8.161532.1@mel.cipl.uiowa.edu> <1990Sep9.202622.21422@servalan.uucp>
Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London, UK.
Lines: 48

In <1990Sep9.202622.21422@servalan.uucp> rmtodd@servalan.uucp (Richard Todd) writes:

>wolf@mel.cipl.uiowa.edu writes:

>>I had not seen anything about this, and it will seem a stupid question but, can
>>any of the files A/UX needs be placed on a unix device (like a DEC5000 disk)?

>You mean, like having the Mac mount an NFS partition off a disk on the DEC
>5000?  Haven't tried it, for obvious reasons (not having a DEC5000 to play
>with :-), but it oughta work.  In which case you should be able to cut down
>that minimum disk space required by A/UX to just enough to give you enough
>of a minimal root partition to NFS mount everything else you need.  

To give you some idea about a minimal root partition, consider the 
following:

1) A/UX 1.1.1 can be booted from three floppies (two if you have a superdrive)
   One 800k floppy holds a root partition without a kernel, and the
   kernel is booted from the Mac filesystem. This fits on a single 800K
   floppy, but if you have 1.4Meg floppies you can have Sash and a Mac
   system as well. This 800K root contains everything you need to be an
   NFS client.

2) A/UX 1.1.1 works OK with a 10 Meg root, 5 meg swap and 5 meg /tmp (we
   don't believe in diskless nodes). If you wanted to, you could run
   A/UX 1.1.1 on an SE/30 with a 20 Meg disk and have 7 meg of local
   disk not included in the above. NFS fileservers hold the rest of the stuff.

3) I am currently working on getting A?UX 2.0 to boot in 10 Meg, including
   the Mac system stuff. This is very tight indeed (you need 3 lots of
   400K+ Mac SYstem files, amongst other reasons) and I am likely to offload
   the actual System Folder into that 5 meg /tmp mentioned above.

If anyone is interested, we have a very rough-and-ready Hypercard stack
which splits the A/UX 2.0 distribution into pieces, and can produce
scripts for cpio-ing selected things from the CD-ROM. No instructions,
no promises, but it might be something to look at if you are looking
for things to throw away. 

I'd also appreciate it if Mr "millions of lines of code" doesn't start
whingeing about "proprietary formats" again - I tend to use the tools
available...
-- 

William Roberts                 ARPA: liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP: liam@qmw-cs.UUCP
Mile End Road                   AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK              Tel:  071-975 5250 (Fax: 081-980 6533)