WeeDog eaten by his FirstRib

Once upon a time there was:

WeeDog Linux

WeeDog was named after a soft toy my youngest son continues to carry around with him for over ten years now… He drew its picture with a pencil one day, and that is the image attached to this post and used as a background in my earlier WDL_Arch64.

“WeeDogLinux can be as large or small as you like, being any resultant distro created using the simple two-script FirstRib core build system (build_firstrib_rootfs and build_weedog_initrd). A working internet connection is required to complete the build. Unlike most build systems, the default smallest WeeDog build time (including download) takes only a matter of minutes.”

It also occurred to me that the WeeDog name seemed to fit in, as an indication of collaboration, on the Linux forum I primarily participated in and contributed to. However, I came to understand, from comments there, that the name “Dog” was used to group together totally different distro designs and to portray them in the negative light of somehow being derived but less pure than the distro that originally featured on the forum. Of course only a few take that attitude, but it isn't the nicest attitude to come across. So, with apologies to my young son, and to WeeDog, his stuffed toy that he carries to his room every night, I have reverted to the original name for that Linux build system project, which is FirstRib.

Was working on a FirstRib L_GO build of Ubuntu Jammy yesterday evening (just the minimum of dpkg/apt version mainly, so not involving debootstrap), and had it building dpkg/apt in to the root filesystem okay, but still had a few problems with distro structure to sort out.

I booted into official Ubuntu, well actually a weedogit frugal of that to check hierarchy prior to some tweaks. Went to remove the firstrib_rootfs build attempt I had made but… sadly… deleted the special script I was using to build it instead and, for once, hadn't bothered to make a back up!

Oh well. May or may not regenerate that work - not too difficult to do now since it is fresh in my mind, but would take a while. We will see.

Actually, I'm not sure if it would be useful to me. WLGO_focal was the last similar distro I made. It is just commandline simplest ever dpkg/apt capable distro that without supplying firmware/modules/kernel would be a couple of tens of MB in size, though around 100MB once I made it general purpose computer bootable. I had thought of using a small LGO jammy64 for headless server purposes or as the basis to build up to a smallish FR desktop jammy64 (as an alternative to the normal build_firstrib_rootfs debootstrap method), but I should be dealing with other family-related matters really.

Also been looking at some of the latest versions of build scripts more generally (including weedogit script I'm currently improving) with view to taking out WeeDog branding and replacing with FirstRib. I want to do that since FirstRib distro ‘products’ do not owe their design to any other distro so won't be provided any longer under some other distro's self-promotion forum umbrella structure.

My audience here, by the way - well, I don't know… but this blog was written and produced for my children.

Tiny Linux Blog: https://www.tinylinux.info/