Paul Fernhout  wrote:

>http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/
>This page contains information on developing FreeBSD to work in various
>small and unusual places, such as single floppy, vnode (vn(4))
>partitions or embedded controllers. Includes image for single floppy
>bootable Forth version.


PicoBSD is a version of FreeBSD that has been pruned and crunched to the bare minimum.
It includes scripts to tailor what you want to include.  You can boot a diskless, 4 MB system from
a floppy and have a router and firewall.  It will run on 386 and up hardware.

This is a full BSD Unix executive with virtual memory and BSD networking.  There is a group
working on adding additional "small" utilities - small webserver, etc.

A thread on the PicoBSD mailing list has been discussing options for building a unified management
frontend.  This begat the Forth effort, but there was discussion about other languages (TCL, Perl,
etc.).

Squeak and PicoBSD have been rolling around in my mind (lots of room) lately.  Some thoughts:

-  Squeak as a platform to build the PicoBSD frontend with:
   I think that something that is text oriented is appropriate here.  Remote access via telnet and
modems
  on serial ports is important.  Paul's embedded Squeak might be a good choice.  Some of my concerns
  are:
--  should you run in scripting mode where source is read, compiled and executed or
    should you support saving images or some other format of compiled code.
    [Python has a nice model for this].
--  how do you develop and debug.  The Smalltalk development environment is very wedded to the
    windowing environment.

- PicoBSD as the base of a Squeak only machine
  If you are tempted to run a bare DOS version of Squeak, this is an interesting alternative.  It is
completely
  free with open source.  1.44 Megabytes will give you a running system with networking (ethernet,
ppp, slip...)
  As for graphics - FreeBSD V3.0 (which PicoBSD is constructed from) included a new graphics library
  that should be fine for porting Squeak to.  It should be a lot lighter (memory and CPU cycles)
than using X.

 What are the downsides?
 -- It only supports x86 at the moment.  There is an Alpha port substantially complete, but that's
it.
 -- I think that the x86 machines that most people might be interested in dedicating too Squeak are
too slow
    for doing interesting Squeak things.  You still need a fast machine to run Morphic.  If you want
to use
    Squeak as a scripting engine (where the scripts are smalltalk source), then I think the compiler
is very,
    very slow compared to other scripting languages.

-david