Webs’ Random Ideas

So I now would like to start a series of postings that involve the Boothbox Project I started at the University as an undergrad. I started this project about a year and a half ago, and basically I knew almost nothing about Linux before I started it. And I have since remastered Boothbox and have become quite proficient at it. The only thing I don’t have memorized is the insanely long command to compile the files and folders into the ISO file.

The link below should be my remastering guide which is straight forward and should allow anyone to be able to work on Boothbox:
Download Boothbox Remastering Guide!

Anyways, so right now I am working on recompiling the kernel. And this is one hell of a daunting task I can tell you. At least for a noob such as myself it is. Unfortunately Boothbox is a streamlined Linux distribution (or distro). It has essentially nothing in it but a Mozilla browser. This is because, as the name suggests, it is a Internet Kiosk or portal. It is made to pop into a computer and it runs right from the CD. At the University we have pulled out the hard drives and floppy drives, so there is nothing that students can do with the machine but browse the Internet. And the software itself is locked down, so you can’t even access any drives from the address bar. Pretty cool stuff. I said unfortunately above, because since it is so streamlined, there is not much to it. So the normal recompiling guides do not really work with Boothbox, making it harder to do. Since everything has been stripped away there is not much to work with. But on the other side of things, having almost nothing in the system makes it boot incredibly fast and secures it pretty damn good as well.

So apparantly the current kernel used for the current version of Boothbox, doesn’t like Dell NIC’s. And it also seems to only try an Internet connection from eth0 which is always going to be an onboard NIC if the Motherboard has a built in NIC. So I have two possible solutions. Figure out a way to get Boothbox to look at more than just eth0, or recompile the kernel. I am looking into both and will post my updates as they appear.