On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 06:53:58PM +0100, Jaromil wrote:
>
> dear devs,
>
> from a twit comes an interesting suggestion:
>
> Hello @DevuanOrg, could you add kernel headers and kbuild to "live"
> images? It would help when installing to machines that only have a USB
> stick for internet access. Thanks for your great work.
> https://twitter.com/dozykraut/status/1108508720881897472
>
> I can well imagine the use-case and think makes sense. Is it a lot to
> do?
>

I don't think this is a good idea. The compressed kernel sources alone
are around 110MB (the current minimal-live is at around 400MB),
meaning a 25% increase in size for everybody, while almost nobody will
use those 110MB.

On top of that, building the kernel will require much more stuff
installed, and up to 3GB of "disk space", which in the case of our
live images means 3GB of RAM. This implies that the "feature" could be
used only on machines with at least 4GB of RAM.

Now, I have literally been cutting *kilobytes* to let the minimal-live
boot with the smallest possible amount of RAM. I really think adding
gigabytes of requirements makes no sense at all, at least for
minimal-live.

On another note, it is not clear to me how do they expect to use this
"feature"? I mean, if it is just to build the few modules needed to
support their usb-network-thing, it's much better to do that on
another working Linux installation, and just copy the few modules. If
they don't have a working Linux installation anywhere, there is
probably no way they will be able to build a set of working kernel
modules from a live image.

I guess the best is for them to install live-sdk, add the packages
they need to the blend, and spin a build.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - Devuan -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
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[ (@@@)  Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ  ]