Gumstick Gentoo - Consolidated Links

I know that it might be difficult to find the location in my tutorial you'd like to start/end, so I decided to consolidate the links with a brief overview of what's covered in each section. Hopefully, this will aid the readers.

Part 1: Know thy Enemy - Portage

• Basic Difficulties of squashing Gentoo into a small space
• Identification of Directories holding much of the storage space
• Overview of tools we will need

Part 2: Always two, there are. A Master and an Apprentice

• Basic definition of Embedded System Development (host, target)
• How to setup your Host for development
• Extracting the Base Gentoo Stage 3 setup

Part 3: Fattening the Turkey

• Developing the core Gentoo system for deployment
• Building kernel with needed options for USB boot
• Editing grub menu.lst for USB boot
  
• Installing X-windows and fluxbox

Part 4: Go forth and Multiply (except for snakes... they're adders)

• Partitioning/Formatting USB Device
• Mounting for deployment
• Deployment of Gentoo onto thumbdrive
• Final setup of Grub.
  

Debian Sarge on USB Thumbdrive

Honestly, I was quite surprised with Debian Sarge. It literally took just installing the OS on a thumb drive for it to work like a charm.

Personally, I downloaded the "businesscard" iso: http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/

This is a core system that boots your host computer, sets up your network devices, and installs a debian system over the internet. Amazingly, it works like a charm.

The only thing I did to minimize the installation size was to choose "manually select packages" when queried about the type of system I would be using.

At the end I had an ~300MB rootfs with no gui. Adding in Xwindows server and a personally selcted KDE bumped this up to ~650MB (in other words, don't just ad in the KDE meta-package. Choose which parts you really need).

It's sad how simple it really becomes when a Distro like Debian uses an initramfs. I will definitely be looking into iniramfs for my PXE-Based Linux Test Software for work.