PeeWeeLinux (www.peeweelinux.org)
In the words of its author, “PeeWeeLinux is an ongoing development effort to provide an environment that makes the configuration and installation of a Linux operating system on an embedded platform as easy and painless as possible.”
Unlike BlueCat Linux, PeeWeeLinux is a Open Source project, but not a product. As such, it doesn’t have dedicated engineering resources behind it, and probably doesn’t go through a testing procedure as rigorous as that for BlueCat.
PeeWeeLinux uses RPM to build and maintain its packages, and has a nice text-mode build system. It specifically supports the 2.2 kernel, USB, PCMCIA, and XFree86.
Using PeeWeeLinux
I was able to install PeeWeeLinux version 0.53.23 and get my application floppy up and running in about an hour. The documentation is quite sparse, but there’s enough to get you started. Generally, these are the steps I followed:
1. | Download the latest distribution from one of the mirrors listed at www.peeweelinux.org. I downloaded the binary-only version, which was over 53MB. The version with full source is almost 200MB! |
2. | Untar the distribution into a filesystem with at least 150MB free (binary only). |
3. | Once it’s untarred, you’ll have a new directory called Embedded_Build. Change to that directory and run the ./pwlconfig script. This script is the heart of PeeWeeLinux—a 20KB bash script that builds and configures your project and builds your bootable image. |
4. | Choose Manage Package Files and then Extract ALL binary RPM files.You won’t have any packages to select until you do this. |
5. | PeeWeeLinux comes with a couple of example projects. I suggest you don’t try to build a new project from scratch; it’s difficult to tell which packages are needed for a project and which are not. Just start with one of the sample packages. For example, to start with the minimal package, just untar examples/minimal.tgz from the PeeWeeLinux root directory, rename projects/minimal to projects/yourprojectname and rerun ./pwlconfig. You should then select the project using the Manage Projects menu. The minimal project includes all of the following: |
6. | Choose Configure Project File System to choose which packages to put in your filesystem. The minimal package almost fills up the entire floppy disk, so Minicom won’t fit. However, the microcom package also comes with PeeWeeLinux, and it’s only 12KB, so let’s choose that package (under Network Serial) as an example. |
7. | Choose Extract File System for Project. This copies all of the contents of the packages to the mnt directory within your project—getting you ready for the next step. |
8. | Load a floppy disk into the drive and choose Load File System onto Target. If all goes well, you’ll have a bootable floppy disk. |
9. |
What’s Included with PeeWeeLinux?
PeeWeeLinux actually comes with a lot of packages, each of which has been recompiled to fit well into an embedded Linux environment.
| Package | Version | License | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ICAClient | 3.0-1 | Commercial | The Citrix Independent Computing Architecture (ICA). |
| XFree86 | 3.3.6-7 | MIT | The X windows system provides the base technology for developing graphical user interfaces.This package contains the basic files needed for an X workstation. However, this package doesn’t provide the hardware-specific X server for the video card. |
| XFree86-Xdpi-fonts | 3.3.6-7 | MIT | Where X is 75 or 100.These packages contain the fonts used on most X windows systems. |
| XFree86-X | 3.3.6-7 | MIT | Where X is any of 3DLabs, 8514, AGX, FBDev, I128, Mach32, Mach64, Mach8, Mono, P9000, S3, S3V, SVGA,VGA16,W32, or Xnest.These packages provide the hardware-specific X server for numerous video chipsets. |
| XFree86-libs | 3.3.6-7 | MIT | XFree86-libs contains the shared libraries needed by most X programs. |
| XFree86-stuff | 3.3.6-7 | MIT | Various programs and utilities built with XFree86. |
| XFree86-twm | 3.3.6-7 | MIT | A simple window manager for the X windows system. |
| XFree86-xdm | 3.3.6-7 | MIT | Manages a collection of X displays that may be on the local host or remote servers. |
| XFree86-xfs | 3.3.6-7 | MIT | Contains the font server for XFree86. xfs can also serve fonts to remote servers. |
| ash | 0.2-2 | BSD | Most Linux desktop distributions use GNU’s bash (Bourne again shell). However, bash is a very large program requiring a lot of memory and storage. The ash shell is a subset of bash. It supports most bash commands, but is considerably smaller and uses less memory. It lacks some command-line features of bash—but most embedded systems won’t have users typing commands at a console anyway. |
| ash-static | 0.2-2 | BSD | The ash-static package contains a statically linked version of the ash shell.This is useful if you’re not using the shared libraries. |
| bash | 2.03-3 | GPL | bash is a GNU project sh -compatible shell or command-language interpreter. bash (Bourne again shell) incorporates useful features from the Korn shell (ksh) and the C shell (csh). Most sh scripts can be run by bash without modification.bash offers several improvements over sh, including command-line editing, unlimited-size command history, job control, shell functions and aliases, indexed arrays of unlimited size and integer arithmetic in any base from 2 to 64. bash is ultimately intended to conform to the IEEE POSIX P1003.2/ISO 9945.2 Shell and Tools standard. |
| bdflush | 1.5-1 | None | The bdflush process starts the kernel daemon, which flushes dirty buffers back to disk (writes all unwritten data to disk). This helps to prevent the buffers from growing too stale. bdflush is normally a basic system process that must run for your system to operate properly. However, in an embedded environment you may not need it, especially if you never write back to your media. |
| boa | 0.94.0-1 | GPL | boa is a single-tasking HTTP server. That means that, unlike traditional Web servers, it doesn’t fork for each incoming connection, nor does it fork many copies of itself to handle multiple connections. It internally multiplexes all of the ongoing HTTP connections, and forks only for CGI programs (which must be separate processes), automatic directory generation, and automatic file gunzipping. |
| busybox | 0.46-2 | GPL | BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or embedded system. |
| cqcam | 0.90pre 11-1 | GPL | A free color QuickCam (PC/ parallel) control program. |
| dev | 1.4-1 | public domain | The Linux operating system uses filesystem entries to represent devices (CD-ROMs, floppy drives, etc.) attached to the machine.This package contains the most commonly used /dev entries required for a console-only system. |
| dhcp | 2.0-2 | distributable | A DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server. Use the pump or dhcpcd package if you need a DHCP client. |
| dhcpcd | 1.3.18pl3-1 | GPL | A DHCP client. |
| digitemp | 1.3-1 | GPL | Reads temperatures from Dallas Semiconductor DS1820 digital temperature sensors. |
| dosfstools | 2.4-1 | GPL | A tool suite to create, check, and repair FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 filesystems. |
| e2fsprogs | 1.19-1 | GPL | The ext2fsprogs package contains essential ext2 filesystem utilities including e2fsck, mke2fs, debugfs, dumpe2fs, tune2fs, and most of the other core ext2 filesystem utilities. |
| ee | 1.4.2-1 | GPL | An easy-to-use text editor. Intended to be usable with little or no instruction. Provides a terminal (curses based) interface. Features pop-up menus.A subset of aee. |
| filesystem | 1.2-2 | public domain | Contains the basic directory layout for the Linux operating system, including the correct permissions for the directories. |
| fileutils | 4.0-3 | GPL | The fileutils package includes a number of GNU versions of common and popular file-management utilities. |
| fvwm2 | 2.2.4-4 | GPL | A window manager for the X windows system. If you install fvwm2, you’ll also need to install fvwm2-icons. |
| fvwm2-icons | 2.2.4-4 | GPL | The fvwm2-icons package contains icons, bitmaps, and pixmaps used by the FVWM and FVWM2 X windows system window managers. |
| glibc | 2.1.3-6 | LGPL | The glibc package contains standard libraries that are used by multiple programs on the system. In order to save disk space and memory, as well as to make upgrading easier, common system code is kept in one place and shared between programs. This particular package contains the most important sets of shared libraries: the standard C library and the standard math library.Without these two libraries, a Linux system will not function—unless you use statically linked binaries.The glibc package also contains national language (locale) support and timezone databases. The original Red Hat source RPM has been modified for PeeWeeLinux. The changes are documented in the spec file. |
| grep | 2.4.2-1 | GPL | The General Regular Expression Processor from GNU. It searches one or more files for a regular expression. |
| gzip | 1.2.4a-1 | GPL | gzip (GNU zip) is a compression utility designed to be a replacement for compress. Its main advantages over compress are much better compression and freedom from patented algorithms. The GNU Project uses it as the standard compression program for its system. |
| initscripts | 1.5-1 | public domain | The initscripts package contains the basic system scripts used to boot the system, change runlevels, and shut the system down cleanly.This package differs significantly from the Red Hat way of doing things. PeeWeeLinux supports only a single runlevel to minimize complexity. |
| ipchains | 1.3.9-1 | GPL | Linux IP firewalling chains is an update to (and hopefully an improvement upon) the Linux kernel packet-filtering code. ipchains allows you to set up firewalls and IP masquerading, etc.Install ipchains if you need to set up firewalling for your network. |
| ipmasqadm | 0.4.2-2 | distributable | This tool allows ipmasq additional setup; it’s needed if you want to activate port forwarding or auto forwarding in 2.2 kernels. |
| iptraf | 2.2.2-1 | GPL | IPTraf is a console-based network-monitoring program that displays information about IP traffic. This program can be used to determine the type of traffic on your network, what kind of service is the most heavily used on what machines, among others. |
| isapnptools | 1.21b-1 | GPL | The isapnptools package contains utilities for configuring ISA Plug-and-Play (PnP) cards that are in compliance with the PnP ISA SpecificationVersion 1.0a. ISA PnP cards use registers instead of jumpers for setting the board address and interrupt assignments. The cards also contain descriptions of the resources that need to be allocated. The BIOS on your system, or isapnptools, uses a protocol described in the specification to find all of the PnP boards and allocate the resources so that none of them conflict. Note that the BIOS doesn’t do a very good job of allocating resources. So isapnptools is suitable for all systems, whether or not they include a PnP BIOS. In fact, a PnP BIOS adds some complications.A PnP BIOS may already activate some cards so that the drivers can find them. Then these tools can unconfigure them or change their settings, causing all sorts of nasty effects. If you have PnP network cards that already work, you should read through the documentation files very carefully before you use isapnptools. Install isapnptools if you need utilities for configuring ISA PnP cards. |
| kernel-basic | 2.2.14-9 | GPL | This package contains a Linux kernel optimized for a generic Intel x86 CPU.Most popular network cards and various routing features are supported. The ext2, FAT, and iso9660 filesystems are recognized. Support for peripherals such as serial ports, parallel ports, framebuffer video, and various IDE devices are included. |
| kernel-basic | 2.2.17-10 | GPL | This package contains a Linux kernel in a very basic configuration.This kernel could be well suited for a rescue system, since most network drivers are included but most other fatty modules are disabled. |
| kernel-emlog | 2.2.17-10 | GPL | This package contains prebuilt device files for the emlog.o module. emlog is a Linux kernel module that makes it easy to access the most recent (and only the most recent) output from a process. It works like tail -f on a log file, except that the required storage never grows. This can be useful in embedded systems, where there isn’t enough memory or disk space for keeping complete log files, but the most recent debugging messages are sometimes needed (for example, after an error is observed). The emlog kernel module implements a simple character-device driver. The driver acts like a named pipe that has a finite, circular buffer. The size of the buffer is easily configurable. As more data is written into the buffer, the oldest data is discarded. A process that reads from an emlog device will first read the existing buffer and then see new text as it’s written. |
| kernel-full | 2.2.17-10 | GPL | This package contains a Linux kernel with most modular options enabled.This package is not a typical embedded kernel but is provided for testing purposes. |
| kernel-source | 2.2.17-10 | GPL | This package contains the kernel sources. (Perhaps providing sources in a binary package seems like a paradox. This source package is provided for the PeeWeeLinux custom kernel build process.) |
| ldconfig | 1.9.5-1 | GPL | ldconfig is a basic system program that determines runtime link bindings between ld.so and shared libraries. ldconfig scans a running system and sets up the symbolic links that are used to load shared libraries properly. It also creates a cache (/etc/ld.so.cache) that speeds the loading of programs that use shared libraries. |
| libjpeg | 6b-1 | GPL | libjpeg supplies support functions for the JPEG image format, to programs that are linked to it. |
| libstdc++ | 2.9.0-1 | GPL | The libstdc++ package contains a snapshot of the EGCS Standard C++ Library v3, an ongoing project to implement the ISO 14882 Standard C++ library. |
| libtermcap | 2.0.8-4 | LGPL | The libtermcap package contains a basic system library needed to access the termcap database. The termcap library supports easy access to the termcap database, so that programs can output character-based displays in a terminal-independent manner.This package has been modified for PeeWeeLinux from the original Red Hat version. |
| lilo | 0.21-3 | MIT | LILO (Linux Loader) is a basic system program that boots your Linux system. LILO loads the Linux kernel from a floppy or hard drive, boots the kernel, and passes control of the system to the kernel. LILO can also boot other operating systems. |
| mgetty | 1.1.21-3 | distributable | The mgetty package contains a “smart” getty that allows logins over a serial line (through a modem). If you’re using a Class 2 or 2.0 modem, mgetty can receive faxes. If you also need to send faxes, you’ll need to install the sendfax program. |
| microcom | 1.01-1 | GPL | microcom is a Minicom-like serial terminal emulator with scripting support. The requirement for this program was to be small enough to fit on a floppy-based Linux distribution, such as the one from the Linux Router Project. They managed to bring the executable size down under 17KB. |
| mingetty | 0.9.4-1 | GPL | The mingetty program is a lightweight, minimalist getty program for use only on virtual consoles. mingetty is not suitable for serial lines (use mgetty instead). |
| minicom | 1.83.1-1 | GPL | Minicom is a serial communications program, a UNIX clone of the well-known MS-DOS Telix program. It has ANSI color, a dialing directory, dial-a-list, script language, and so on. |
| modutils | 2.3.9-1 | GPL | This package contains the module utilities for the 2.2 kernels. Install the full package if you need to use modprobe or need to remove modules. In an embedded environment, modules generally only need to be installed. The minimal package provides insmod to install modules, and nothing else. |
| modutils-minimal | 2.3.9-1 | GPL | This package contains the module utilities for the 2.2 kernels. Install the full package if you need to use modprobe or need to remove modules. In an embedded environment, modules generally only need to be installed. The minimal package provides insmod to install modules, and nothing else. |
| msntp | 1.5-1 | freely distributable | msntp can be used as an NTP client to query an NTP or SNTP server and either display the time or set the local system’s time (given suitable privileges). It can be run as an interactive command, in a cron job, or as a daemon. It can be run as a daemon to provide an SNTP server for other clients.NTP is the Network Time Protocol (RFC 1305) and SNTP is the Simple Network Time Protocol (RFC 2030, which supersedes RFC 1769). |
| nano | 0.9.21-1 | GPL | nano (Nano’s ANOther editor, or Not ANOther editor) aims to emulate Pico as closely as possible while offering a few enhancements.Requires ncurses. |
| ncftp | 3.0.1-1 | Artistic | ncftp is a program that implements the File Transfer Protocol. It allows a user to transfer files to and from a remote network site, and offers additional features that are not found in the standard interface. |
| ncurses | 5.1-4 | distributable | The curses library routines are a terminal-independent method of updating character screens with reasonable optimization. The ncurses (new curses) library is a freely distributable replacement for the discontinued 4.4 BSD classic curses library. |
| net-tools | 1.54-1 | GPL | The net-tools package contains the basic tools needed for setting up networking: ethers, route, and others. |
| netkit-base | 0.16-2 | BSD | The netkit-base package contains the basic networking tools ping and inetd.netkit-base is required on any machine running telnetd, ftpd, and other network daemons. |
| netkit-ftp | 0.10-1 | BSD | The ftp package provides the standard UNIX command-line FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client. FTP is a widely used protocol for transferring files over the Internet and for archiving files.If your system is on a network, you should install FTP in order to do file transfers. |
| netkit-telnet | 0.14-3 | BSD | Telnet is a popular protocol for logging into remote systems over the Internet. The telnet package provides a command-line Telnet client as well as a Telnet daemon, which supports remote logins into the host machine. The Telnet daemon is enabled by default. You can disable the Telnet daemon by editing /etc/inetd.conf.Install the telnet package if you want to Telnet to remote machines and/or support remote logins to your own machine. |
| netscape-navigator | 4.74-2 | free to use but restricted | Netscape Communicator is an all-in-one Web browser and communications suite that makes it easy to send Internet email, read newsgroups, create Web pages, and browse the World Wide Web.This is a reduced footprint edition without email or news client and some other “unimportant” features such as help. |
| networkscripts | 1.1-1 | public domain | The networkscripts package contains essential scripts and configuration files to bring up networking on the PeeWeeLinux system.This package is required for networking. |
| nullidentd | 1.0-1 | GPL | nullidentd is a minimal identd server. All identd requests are responded to with the same (false) answer. It’s intended as a very small (possibly secure) daemon to run on a firewall for connections to servers that use identd responses. |
| portfwd | 0.15-2 | GPL | portfwd, by Everton da Silva Marques, is a small C++ utility that forwards incoming TCP connections and/or UDP packets to remote hosts. It features forwarding based on originator port, multiple ports forwarded from one config file, and FTP forwarding, which requires two ports.Check the home page at http://nucleo.freeservers.com/portfwd for full details and features. |
| ppp | 2.3.11-1 | distributable | The ppp package contains the PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) daemon and documentation for PPP support. The PPP protocol provides a method for transmitting datagrams over serial point-to-point links.The ppp package should be installed if your machine needs to support the PPP protocol. |
| procps | 2.0.7-2 | GPL | procps is a package of utilities that report on the state of the system, including the states of running processes, amount of memory available, and currently-logged-in users. |
| procps-ncurses | 2.0.7-2 | GPL | This is an add-on to procps. The binaries require ncurses to function. |
| pump | 0.7.8-1 | MIT | pump is a combined BOOTP and DHCP client daemon, which allows your machine to retrieve configuration information from a server.You should install this package if you’re on a network that uses BOOTP or DHCP. |
| sed | 3.02-1 | GPL | sed, the GNU Stream Editor, copies the named files (standard input default) to the standard output, edited according to a script of commands. |
| setserial | 2.17-1 | GPL | setserial is a tool to set/report the configuration information associated with a serial port. This information includes which I/O port and which IRQ a particular serial port is using. |
| sh-utils | 2.0-3 | GPL | sh-utils is a package of small shell programming utilities.They’re mostly compliant with POSIX.2, where applicable. The programs that can be built with this package include basename, chroot, date, dirname, echo, env, expr, factor, false, groups, hostname, id, logname, nice, nohup, pathchk, printenv, printf, pwd, seq, sleep, stty, su, tee, test, true, tty, uname, users, who, whoami, and yes. |
| stamp | 2.0.8-1 | GPL | stamp is a command-line program that processes a color or grayscale JPEG image, such as one produced by a Quickcam. It can add a graphical (and configurable) timestamp to the image. stamp can also upload the timestamped image via FTP, with the configuration of a stamprc file. |
| sysklogd | 1.3.31-4 | GPL | The sysklogd package contains two system utilities (syslogd and klogd) that provide support for system logging. syslogd and klogd run as daemons (background processes) and log system messages to sendmail logs, security logs, error logs, etc. |
| sysvinit | 2.78-3 | GPL | init is the parent of all processes. Its primary role is to create processes from a script stored in the file /etc/inittab.This package also contains well-known popular utilities such as reboot, shutdown, killall, poweroff, tellinit, sulogin, wall, etc. |
| tar | 1.13-1 | GPL | GNU tar saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. It includes multivolume support, the ability to archive sparse files, automatic archive compression and decompression, remote archives, and special features that allow tar to be used for incremental and full backups. It also includes rmt, the remote tape server (the mt tape-drive control program is in GNU cpio). |
| tcpdump | 3.5.2-1 | BSD | tcpdump prints out the headers of packets on a network interface. It’s very useful for debugging network problems and security operations. |
| textutils | 2.0a-1 | GPL | A set of GNU utilities for modifying the contents of files, including programs for splitting, joining, comparing, and modifying files. |
| thttpd | 2.15-1 | BSD | thttpd is a simple, small, fast, and secure HTTP server. It doesn’t have a lot of special features, but it suffices for most uses of the Web. It’s faster than Apache and has one extremely useful feature (URL-traffic–based throttling) that no other server currently has. |
| tinylogin | 0.78-2 | GPL | TinyLogin is a suite of tiny UNIX utilities for handling logins, user authentication, changing passwords, and otherwise maintaining users and groups on an embedded system. It also provides shadow password support to enhance system security.As the name implies, TinyLogin is very small, and makes an excellent addition to an embedded system. |
| util-linux | 2.10m-4 | GPL | util-linux is a suite of essential utilities for any Linux system. Its primary audience is system integrators and DIY Linux hackers. util-linux is attempting to be portable, but the only platform it has been tested on very much is Linux i386. |
| vim | 5.7-3 | free to use but restricted | vim is an almost fully compatible version of the UNIX editor vi. Many new features have been added including multilevel undo, syntax highlighting, command-line history, online help, filename completion, and block operations. This is a minimal binary called vi that requires termcap. |
| vim-ncurses | 5.7-3 | free to use but restricted | This package is a minimal binary called vim that requires ncurses (see above for details on vim). |
| vixie-cron | 3.0.1-2 | distributable | The vixie-cron package contains theVixie version of cron. cron is a standard UNIX daemon that runs specified programs at scheduled times. vixie-cron adds better security and more powerful configuration options to the standard version of cron. |
| wget | 1.5.3-1 | GPL | GNU wget is a freely available network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web using HTTP and FTP, the two most widely used Internet protocols. It works non-interactively, thus enabling users to work in the background after logging off. |
| xpm | 3.4k-2 | MIT | The xpm package contains the XPM pixmap library for the X windows system. The XPM library allows applications to display color and pixmapped images, and is used by many popular X programs. |
PeeWeeLinux Pros and Cons
Let’s take a look at how well PeeWeeLinux stacks up to our list of questions.
What is the size of image produced?
The image size produced by PeeWeeLinux isn’t all that small. The big problem is the use of glibc. It can be difficult to get away from glibc, but for really small applications you have to do it. The glibc file that comes with PeeWeeLinux is just over 1MB. Using uClibc or even the old libc5 may be a better choice. This does complicate the development environment somewhat, but it’s worth it in terms of cost.
What architectures are supported?
PeeWeeLinux has an impressive array of x86 targets, but as of this writing, x86 only. If you’re looking for PowerPC, StrongARM, etc., look elsewhere.
For x86, PeeWeeLinux supports the following environments:
Compressed RAM disk on ext2 partition
Uncompressed RAM disk on FAT 16 partition
Uncompressed RAM disk on ext2 partition
Read-only root filesystem with multiple RAM disks
Compressed RAM disk on floppy disk without bootloader
Compressed RAM disk on FAT 12 floppy disk with syslinux
Read-write root on a single partition
How easy is the toolkit to use?
Getting started with PeeWeeLinux is fairly easy. It took less than two hours to get my first bootable floppy image running after installing the software.
How many optional packages are available?
PeeWeeLinux boasts almost 100 packages. Some of them are of dubious value within an embedded system, but most are quite useful.
What exceptional packages are available?
PeeWeeLinux gives you the tools necessary to build a Web-based configuration package, namely the thttpd and boa Web servers. However, nothing is set up for you.
There are a couple of pieces of specific hardware support that might be interesting: the Color QuickCam and the Dallas Semiconductor DS1280 digital temperature sensors.
PeeWeeLinux comes with four prebuilt Linux x86 kernels and with the kernel source in case you decide to build your own.
The authors of PeeWeeLinux have also taken the time to strip Netscape down to the minimum code required for a browser. This is helpful because the full browser suite with email and newsreader is quite large. Of course, Netscape requires X windows, and PeeWeeLinux has support for that, too.
How customizable is the image? How difficult is it to customize?
To add custom software to your project, you add the files to the Project Custom Source Path. Each file and directory within this directory is copied to the destination directory during the build process.
While this is simple and effective, it does have some drawbacks. This directory structure could quickly become polluted with cruft as you try different ideas while building your device. If you want to use part of your software in another project, it may become difficult to extract just those pieces from a big jumbled mess.
If you want to do serious development, hook into the package system of PeeWeeLinux and save the Project Custom Source Path for quick-and-dirty changes during the development process.
How much does the toolkit cost? Is a royalty involved?
PeeWeeLinux is completely free.
How well is the toolkit documented? Is printed documentation available?
Documentation for Open Source projects typically falls into two categories:“much weaker than proprietary products” and “much stronger than proprietary projects.” It seems that some magic threshold must be crossed before the documentation is really there. As of this writing, the PeeWeeLinux documentation is in the former category—there’s just not much there. To figure out how the product is working, you have to look at the source.
But don’t let that stop you from using PeeWeeLinux if it fits well in the other categories—it’s not hard to figure out how to use it.
How well is the toolkit supported? Paid support? Active list?
The PeeWeeLinux mailing list had 30–40 members as of early 2001. The package seems to be updated at least on a monthly basis. The author is available for technical support, and does short-duration consulting work.
What are the requirements to use the toolkit?
PeeWeeLinux has been tested on all versions of Red Hat Linux from 6.0 through 7.0. It is also known to work with Mandrake 7.0.You’ll need 200MB of free space to install it.
Can a new version of the toolkit be installed without losing changes?
PeeWeeLinux expects your projects to be in one of its subdirectories. Because of this restriction, upgrading can be a little disconcerting—you’re going to install on top of your current projects. They shouldn’t be overwritten, but if they are, well, I hope you have backups.
Really, the best thing to do is remove the projects directory as soon as you install PeeWeeLinux and create a symbolic link to somewhere else in your filesystem.