Re: [Sheflug] quick boot with no login

[José Luis Gómez Dans <nospam [at] sheffield.ac.uk>]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 06:45:41PM +0100, Ross wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> as previously posted, i've got my antique laptop to run on debian to provide our engineers with a terminal acess tool for a building management system...
> 
> trouble with engineers is they always want a bit more than you deliver!

	I'm considering whether to be of any help or not after this
comment... X-) (/me has a right pain of mathematicians using long words and computer scientists using macros and acronyms)

> the only critisism is that it takes a while to boot and shutdown (albeit once a day) and they have to login!

	You can recompile the kernel and have the minimal in it. It
takes ages to decompress on a 386/25. You can then start going through
/etc/init.d  and have a look at what's starting up. For instance, you
can probably disable inetd and a host of other daemons (not many are
started in debian, but you don't need cron or anything like that).
	

> security is not an issue, neither is the full networking capability of the linux system......
> 
> i want to make it as simple as possible to run... to this end i would like to boot the machine up in (possibly) single user mode and set an init script up to fire up minicom imediately to communicate on the serial port /dev/ttyS0.
> 
> can anyone recomend an easy solution to this?

	Is /etc/inittab of any use? getty starts up the consoles, and
launches /bin/login. A "do-nothing" shell script instead of /bin/login
will probably do. Then there's the actual spawning of the terminal... I
suppose that this could also be accomplished with getty, but I am not
sure of this. There is a text-terminal HOWTO somewhere in /usr/doc/HOWTO
:)
	You might be interested in microcom, a minicom lookalike which
fits in 17k. it's in http://microcom.port5.com. It comes together with
an LRP disk to do just that!

	Best luck
	José

> --
> Thanks,
>         Ross
>                ross.h [at] ntlworld.com
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-- 
José L Gómez Dans			PhD student
					Radar & Communications Group
					Department of Electronic Engineering
					University of Sheffield UK
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