The Chant of the Trolloc Hordes 3280

I don't know about the size of the emulator, but a barely usable Linux system can be squeezed surprisingly tight. A few years ago we developed a combined fileserver (SMB since it was targeted at small Windows shops) + dialin-Gateway + WebProxy + DHCP server. Since the boss was notoriously tight with money, we had to fit it all into as as small a flash disk as possible.

The final setup used a 16 MB Flashdisk and contained - a Linux 2.6 kernel - a seriously stripped down user environment - completely stripped init (system booted in less than 3 seconds after the boot loader got control from the BIOS) - the full Samba package (quite a disk hog) - a pretty much complete Perl environment (needed for the config system and a serious disk hog)

The trick was - starting with a minimum system that contained only what was needed (we bootstraped from Debian) - rebuilding the kernel to contain everything that was needed but nothing more - going over the filesystem with a very fine pick and removing every file that wasn't needed - using CRAMFS (compressing filesystem extremly optimized for space efficiency) for everything butboot and a very, very small root filesystem

And we still kept ssh for remote Debt Management and local consoles for emergeny access ;-)

Yes, the system had (quite big for the time) disk(s). But the idea was to keep the system completely on flash and use the disks completely for user data.

Regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison