Choosing an OS to run Cerberus Alpha

In case you haven't figured out by now, part of the reason I'm doing this "write up" is because I want to be able to recall it later in case I want to do it again, or use the same method. After having built the main menu, I began to write the reboot and install functions. These would be changed too many times to count, but their form and function was essentially the same. Testing on my "Raspberry Pi" eventually got to the point where I needed to test the script in more of a live environment rather than the development space I was using. Very early on in the project, I thought that I would try making an MSDOS boot CD, based on a tutorial I read online. I abandoned this idea pretty early on as I realized that I'm not very skilled in writing programs for DOS and because it may actually pose a problem to get access to the target system due to some security features. My next idea was to build a script that would run directly from ISOLINUX. I don't know what I was thinking really. ISOLINUX is a boot loader. So after that stupid idea I set out to find a suitable OS. Extremely fast boot was the main consideration for what OS to use for my Live CD. The four main Linux distributions that I considered were Slitaz, Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and Tiny Core Linux. I've done a lot of fun stuff using Puppy Linux and it runs very well from a boot CD, but it loads its whole OS into memory and I decided it was too slow on boot for this application. Slitaz is generally very fast to boot, but I felt it still had more stuff than I needed. Tiny Core Linux is what I decided on, as I watched some videos and it seemed to boot extremely fast. Combined with a boot image that is around 14 MB I felt Tiny Core would be a very good way to go. It also loads into memory, but with such a small OS to load, it does not take very long. Damn Small Linux is something that I never got a chance to try, but I may come back to it some time. I installed VMWare on my computer and got to work testing the script in Tiny Core. Right from the get-go, it was obvious that I would need to make changes to the script for it to fit into Tiny Core, but that will be for the next post!