[sdiy] bootable linux cd

[Rainer Buchty]

> DOS might, in fact, be a good place to start experimenting because it
> doesn't get in the way very much.

On the other hand, it doesn't offer very much which you can't re-do
yourself in a few minutes, but OTOH lacks a lot of what you really need
(and which needs to be patched into using sometimes rather strange ways).
Besides, it's entirely IBM-PC centric.

So why not creating a very own light-weighted "MusicOS" just providing the
necessary framework like

- disk I/O
- serial & MIDI I/O
- USB
- Ethernet / TCP/IP stack
- video output
- system timers

and on a higher level

- task switcher
- memory management

A friend of mine did something similar (lacking USB and TCP/IP)  for a
Motorola Dragonball based system he designed being the heart of his
home-brew multimedia system. It's just below 50kB, where USB would add
another ~50kB (he just did a port for the X-Box FreeBIOS), TCP/IP around
4kB.

Rainer