While tinkering around the house the other day, I remembered that my wife’s old laptop had suffered some kind of win98 related meltdown (it claimed it was missing a dll and could no longer boot) and was in need of a new operating system. Simultaneously, I realized that I had some of these little 3″ CD-R blanks lying around. They hold 185Mbytes, and I thought to myself that surely there must a useful unix distribution that will fit on them.

An hour of two later, I had Debian installed on my laptop. Unfortunately I am not very comfortable with Debian Linux, preferring FreeBSD to Linux in almost every respect (hey, call it personal preference). I’d tinkered around with PicoBSD a bit when FreeBSD 3.2 was around, so I’ve begun working on resurrecting that idea to create a customized FreeBSD boot CDROM
that fits on one of these small CD-R blanks, and enables me to interact with the network via ssh, ftp and lynx, mount NFS drives, and generally just tinker.
Once I figure out some mysteries relating to the behavior of vnconfig, I think it will be pretty straightforward. Stay tuned.