Leanux - Running Linux on FAT just for fun

Most of the flash devices assume that fat is the only file-system. And there are plenty of electronic devices that run linux on fat. So just to know what it is to run linux on vfat, I tried it myself.

The openSUSE 11.1 installer wont allow you to partition the root as vfat. So I made 2 partitions, one ext3 and one vfat. Installed on ext3. Copied the whole partition to fat. I copied original files in place of symbolic links. Added vfat filesystem module to initrd . Modified grub boot from the fat partition with init=/bin/bash.

FAT's lack of support for posix file-permissions. was easy to overcome by mounting with all permissions to everyone, without users or noexec. It doesn't support symlinks, and special files. mknod will fail. But /dev is a tmpfs and it just copies the persistent files from /dev to the tmpfs on boot, instead of copying I created fresh device files in tmpfs. `mount` failed trying lock the file /etc/mtab. Mounting with -n worked. I guess plenty of things would fail if I try to run a proper desktop on FAT as it is.

I booted only to /bin/bash. When I tried doing a "exec init 1", it complained something like cannot remove /var/run/do_confirm. I didn't proceed further. This was a fun way to kill time while getting some insight of the booting process.

Latest and greatest(untested)?!

Linus released

• 2.6.24 on January 24th 2008,
• 2.6.26 on July 13th, 2008, and
• 2.6.27 on October 9 2008
  

Here is when it reached the users

• Gentoo 2008.0 released on July 6, 2008 has linux 2.6.24 which was ~5.5 months old.

• Ubuntu 8.10 released on October 30th, 2008 has 2.6.27 which was ~0.6 months old.

• Fedora 10 released on 25 November 2008 has 2.6.27 which was ~1.5 months old.

• Opensuse 11.1 released on December 18th, 2008, has 2.6.27 wihch was roughly ~2.3 months old.

• Debian 5.0 released on February 14th, 2009 has 2.6.26 which was roughly ~7 months old.
  

Distros used by power-users seems to be always running slightly older version compared to the distros aimed at the layman! Yeah, but power users^Wdevelopers use the unstable/development/factory/head version of their favourite distro and not the released stable. But Ubuntu stable(!) is based on debian unstable! And debian stable is so outdated. opensuse seems to be quiet the latest but not straight from the unstable development snapshot.

p.s: I use only opensuse regularly among these distros. So any mis-information and bias is likely. ;)