Some years ago, when the Linux kernel was still at version
0.99, I took a few
days to assemble my own GNU/Linux system. It was a great
deal of fun that, but
it was tedious work, so I went back to working with
Slackware, which at least
had all the basics precompiled. When I found myself with
time enough last
week to build a new computer from scrap parts I thought it
might be fun to do
it once again, with a twist.
The twist is that the computer is a PC without a monitor. I
only have one
monitor, which I use for my workstation, and I think it's a
waste to put a
monitor on a PC that I will use to play with just because
someone once thought
that serial consoles didn't need to exist on a PC. So I
assembled a boot
floppy which contained syslinux and the linux kernel, set up
for serial
console support and booted on that.
I must admit though that I had to borrow a monitor for a few
minutes to
configure the BIOS. That continues to annoy me to no end.
But once that
was sorted out, I was able to boot into a floppy shell,
configure the
network enough to pull down a root image I had prepared
earlier with
enough static binaries to be able to pull up a working
system.
Reboot, into the real system, configure network, get more
software and
recompile them dynamically and voila, a brand new system.
Let me point out
that the system I build was made completely from parts of
the GNU project,
except for some specific parts that I consider to be part of
the Linux
kernel support (like ifconfig, route and so on). So if this
is not a
GNU/Linux system, I don't know what is.
I'll probably continue to add software to it, like Perl and
nvi, but it
will always be a GNU/Linux system, just like any of my other
servers and
workstations.