NanoBSD and PicoBSD questions

[Pete Wright]

On 7/17/20 7:12 AM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am just now coming to FreeBSD over from the Linux world.
>
> In the past,I read a little bit about a 6BM BSD version made from FreeBSd
> called MiniBSD which was only 6MB in size but unfortunately that was for an
> i386 base and the project seems to be now dead.
>
> I am very interest possibly generating up some in ultra-thin FreeBSD
> versions for the x86_64 (AMD) platform that can be along the same size or
> smaller, of course without an xserver as I am looking into SDL & DirectFB
> to run the GUI single application (no desktop needed) that I want.
>
> On that note, I have also read that FreeBSD has some "tools" that may be
> able to generate versions of PicoBSD (around 2MB) and NanoBSD (??? MB) so I
> have set up a FreeBSD system so that I can try to generate some ISO's if
> possible.
>
> For this project, an initial FreeBSD, or dialect, being the smaller the
> better with just the absolute bare essentials on it so that I can add
> things as needed.
>
> What I am not sure about here is how to install the FreeBSD tools that seem
> to have the shell scripts that will generate PicoBSD and NanoBSD.
>
> I would like to be able to download a pre-built ISO of these just to see
> them run before jumping into the effort but cannot find them anywhere.

This link is a good starting point for nanobsd:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/index.html

the scripts and configs for nanobsd are part of the source FreeBSD 
distribution, so if you checkout the code nanobsd will be available in 
$CHECKOUT/tools/tools/nanobsd/

This document provides a pretty good overview of the structure of the 
project itself (assuming you are interesting in building products based 
on FreeBSD):
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/building-products/article.html

hope this helps get you pointed in the right direction.

cheers,
-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA