VERY basic linux system 251

In a message on 25 Jan 2006 08:38:48 -0800, wrote :

Why?

Why? Just about every shell you can think up (and a few more besides) has some variation of 'alias' built in.

This just plain makes no sense.

It sounds like what you want is CP-M or basically MS-DOS.

Some of it is doable and really depends on what you mean. Linux is multi-user multi-tasking -- in practice, there is no real separation between "multi-user" and "multi-tasking". Yes, in theory it is possible to have a multi-tasking operating system with a single real 'user', but once you have a multi-tasking kernel, multi-user is pretty much required if you are going move outside of an educational toy system, esp. if you have any interest in security and plan on using *any* sort of network with *any* other systems. It is not uncommon for Linux boxes to only have one 'real' username inetc-pbuttword (other than 'root' and all of the non-login usernames). My laptop only has one real user account (myself), plus root, plus the usuall collection of no login 'accounts' used by various system processes and daemons and such. My laptop is a 'normal' Linux system with only one *real* 'user', although theetc-pbuttwd file is well populated.

Moving from the UNIX filesystem heirarchy to drive letters or names is just a step backwards and solves no problems and only creates new ones. You can 'fake' this with environment variables to some extent.

Command names are arbitary and virtually all command shells allow all sorts of customization, from practical to completely silly.

It is possible to strip a UNIX distro down to fit completely on a floppy -- Tom's Boot Floppy is an example. But I don't think Tom's includes a complete development environment. You can't use gcc *by itself* for much. You also need the binutils. And the libraries. And header files. And cpp. And you might as well toss in make, autoconf-automake-libtool, sed, etc. Pretty soon you have quite a lot of stuff. And stuff supporting stuff, and stuff supporting the support stuff, etc.