Free boot software for linux

Navyn OS is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Gentoo. Navyn OS is a live CD which can be booted from a CD-ROM, but it can also be installed on hard disk.
Most applications included with Navyn OS have very low resource requirements.
Enhancements:
- new kernel 2.6.9; SATA disks are now supported; fixed installation problems; all programs are updated; now you can choose framebuffer resolution during boot; added new programs: LFTP (ftp client), xfsprogs (for XFS partitioning), rar; new security programs gkrellmwireless, macchanger, hydra, stunnel, fping, nast; added script for automounting partitions; added support for mouse with scroll wheel.

BootRoot creates a boot disk with lilo, a kernel and an initrd image. The initrd script mounts another root disk with a compressed (gzip or bzip2) filesystem.

The root filesystem isnt made by this program, but there lots of compressed filesytems out there to use.

You can use a bzip2 compressed filesystem, this program is easy to use, and it provides a framework showing a simple initrd method which you can freely modify.

The four steps to making a Boot Root set.

1). Grab the Perl Script right here .. boot_root give it a name .. umm .. boot_root.

2). Make sure the bang line points to the right place:

$ which perl
/usr/bin/perl
$ grep "perl -w" boot_root
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

3). Make it executable:

$ chmod 755 boot_root

4). Put it in one of your LIB PATHS:

$ echo $PATH /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:.:
$ mv boot_root /usr/bin

5). Run it, and have lots of fun! More directions can be found at the beginning of the script.

ClusterKnoppix is a modified Knoppix distro using the OpenMosix kernel.
Main features:
- OpenMosix terminal server - uses PXE, DHCP and tftp to boot linux clients via the network.
- No cdrom drive/harddisk/floppy needed for the clients
- openMosix autodiscovery - new nodes automatically join the cluster (no configuration needed)
- Cluster Management tools - openMosix userland/openMosixview Every node has root access to every other node via ssh/RSAkeys
- MFS/dfsa support
- Every node can run full blown X (PC-room/demo setup) or console only (more memory available)
Enhancements:
- Sync with latest Knoppix release
- openmosix 2.4.27-om-20040808 from tabs patches (http://openmosix.snarc.org)
- openmosix-tools 0.3.6-2
- tyd 1.5
- added: openswan 2.1.5, ipw2100, drbd, fuse, bcm4400 (debian package)
- new feature: option to boot 2.4.27-om-migshm-20040808 from (http://dev.gentoo.org/~voxus/om/) type migshm after the boot: prompt
- new feature: option to boot chaos nodes as PXE clients (chaos kernel upgraded to openmosix 2.4.27-om-20040808 and 2.4.27-om-migshm-20040808)

Bioknoppix is a customized distribution of Knoppix Linux Live CD. With this distrubution you just boot from the CD and you have a fully functional Linux OS distribution with open source applications targeted for the molecular biologist. Beside using some RAM, Bioknoppix doesnt touch the host computer, being ideal for demonstrations, molecular biology students, workshops, etc.

CD Shell is a scriptable menu system that provides the ability to create interactive multi-boot optical discs. It will make PC-bootable compact discs or DVDs that can select from several program loaders or kernels located on the disc, or boot from other local disk drives that are attached to the system.
This utility is based heavily on concepts pioneered by Bart Lagerweij in his great program Diskem1x. CD Shell provides similar functionality to Diskem1x along with many new original features, such as an advanced scripting language, graphics, and mouse support. It also has the ability to interface with other great programs such as isolinux/memdisk, Ranish Partition Manager, and Memtest86+.
CD Shell is free for non-commercial use. The program and its source code is distributed under the NASM License. The distribution and use of some optional components is restricted by their respective licenses.
Enhancements:
- changed behavior of display.message to interpret a backslash as a single-character quote if not recognized as an escape sequence (suggested by Erwin Veermans of the Ultimate Boot CD project)
- isolinux patches as suggested by Charles Appel of the Ultimage Boot CD project
- patched a bug in isolinux that would display some garbage characters when loading a kernel (just before Ready)
- changed behavior for the display command to not show a splash screen unless isolinux was invoked with an empty command line
- incorporated changes to chooser script
- allow onEscape action when user quits the menu
- allow per-item exececute-on-select commands
- fixed a bug where text in the message window wasnt being updated correctly

ffsearch-LiveCD is a modified Knoppix-Linux with Fast File Search running on top of it. This way, no installation is required!

You can download an Iso, burn it on CD, put the disc in you CD-drive and boot it up. It crawls the net for SMB and FTP shares and provides you with a web interface for searching these files.

Bootchart is a software for performance analysis and visualization of the GNU/Linux boot process. Resource utilization and process information are collected during the boot process and can later be displayed in a PNG, SVG or EPS-encoded chart.

The boot process is modified to start the boot logger (/sbin/bootchartd) instead of /sbin/init. The boot logger will run in background and collect information from the proc file system (/proc/[PID]/stat, /proc/stat and /proc/diskstats).

The statistics are logged to a virtual memory file system (tmpfs). Once the boot process completes (denoted by the existence of specific processes), the log files are packaged to /var/log/bootchart.tgz.

The log package can later be processed using a Java application which builds the process tree and renders a performance chart. The chart may then be analyzed to examine process dependency and overall resource utilization. A renderer web form is also available on the project web site.

The chart can then be analyzed to examine process dependency and overall resource utilization.

Runing:

1. Install bootchartd and the bootchart renderer. See INSTALL for details.

2. Modify your boot loader (GRUB/LILO) if necessary. Alternatively, change the kernel command line interactively upon reboot.
Reboot.

3. Verify that /var/log/bootchart.tgz was created and contains the log files.

4. Render the chart by running:

$ java -jar bootchart.jar

Alternatively (if no Java Development Kit is installed to build the JAR package), the web renderer may be used.

To use the web renderer from a script, run:
curl --form format=svg --form log=@/var/log/bootchart.tgz
http://bootchart.klika.si:8080/bootchart/render > bootchart.svgz

(optionally replacing the svg/bootchart.svgz pair with png/bootchart.png or eps/bootchart.eps.gz)

5. View the generated image and analyze the chart.
SVG images may be viewed using any of the following programs:
- rsvg-view (librsvg; GNOME)
- svgdisplay (ksvg; KDE)
- Gimp (using the gimp-svg plugin)
- Inkscape
- Squiggle (Batik; http://xml.apache.org/batik/)

To get help for additional options, run:

$ java -jar bootchart -h

How it works:

Logger Startup

The boot logger (/sbin/bootchartd) is run by the kernel instead of /sbin/init. This can be achieved by modifying the GRUB or LILO kernel command line, e.g.:

/boot/grub/menu.lst
[...]
title Fedora Core (2.6.10) - bootchart
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.10 ro root=/dev/hda1 init=/sbin/bootchartd
initrd /initrd-2.6.10.img

The installation script and RPM package will try to add the boot loader entry automatically.

The boot logger will start itself in the background and immediately run the default init process, /sbin/init. The boot process will then continue as usual.

Data Collection

Since the root partition is mounted read-only during boot, the logger needs to store data in memory, using a virtual memory file system (tmpfs).

As soon as the /proc file system is mounted — usually early in the sysinit script — the logger will start collecting output from various files:
/proc/stat system-wide CPU statistics: user, system, IO and idle times
/proc/diskstats system-wide disk statistics: disk utilization and throughput
(only available in 2.6 kernels)
/proc/[PID]/stat information about the running processes: start time, parent PID, process state, CPU usage, etc.

The contents of these files are periodically appended to corresponding log files, every 0.2 seconds by default.

The logger will try to detect the end of the boot process by looking for specific processes. For example, when in runlevel 5 (multi-user graphical mode), it will look for gdmgreeter, kdm_greet, etc. As soon as one of these processes is found running, the logger will stop collecting data, package the log files and store them to /var/log/bootchart.tgz.

Optional Process Accounting

In most cases, the output from /proc/[PID]/stat files suffices to recreate the process tree. It is possible however, that a short-lived process will not get picked up by the logger. If that process also forks new processes, the logger will lack dependency information for these "orphaned" processes — meaning that they might get incorrectly grouped by the chart renderer.

When truly accurate dependency information is required, process accounting may be utilized. If configured, the kernel will keep a log file with detailed information about processes. BSD process accounting v3 includes information about the process PID and parent PID (PPID) — effectively enabling an accurate reconstruction of the process tree.

To enable process accounting, the kernel needs to be configured to include CONFIG_BSD_PROCESS_ACCT_V3, under:

[ ] General setup
[ ] BSD Process Accounting
[ ] BSD Process Accounting version 3 file format

The GNU accounting utilities (package psacct or acct) also need to be installed. The boot logger will use the accton command to enable process accounting; it will include the accounting log in the tarball.

Visualization

The log tarball is later passed to the Java application for parsing and rendering the data. The CPU and disk statistics are used to render stacked area and line charts. The process information is used to create a Gantt chart showing process dependency, states and CPU usage.

A typical boot sequence consists of several hundred processes. Since it is difficult to visualize such amount of data in a comprehensible way, tree pruning is utilized. Idle background processes and short-lived processes are removed. Similar processes running in parallel are also merged together.

Finally, the performance and dependency charts are renderer as a single image in either PNG, SVG or EPS format.

p54u is a reverse engineered driver for USB Prism54 SoftMAC wireless devices with the ISL3880, ISL3886, and GW3887 chipsets.
p54u project supports many of the USB adapters sold nowadays.
Enhancements:
- This release adds FreeBSD 6 support, a new firmware upload scheme (at last, it will work when the device is connected at boot time), and a new fix for the ARM memory allocator, eliminating some more random device failures.