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Hack 53 Pebble

Use this tiny Debian-based distribution for
your own custom wireless access point.

Terry
Schmidt of NYCwireless has done terrific
work in getting together a stripped down Linux distribution
specifically tailored for wireless access points in general, and for
the Soekris [Hack #51] platform in particular.
This distribution is called Pebble, and is freely available at
http://www.nycwireless.net/pebble/.
It aims to balance functionality with size, weighing in at
about 47 MB. As it is based on Debian, customizing the installed
software is very straightforward. Unlike some
very tiny distributions, it uses standard
libraries and binaries. This significantly simplifies upgrades, and
it means that custom packages don't have to be built
from source and linked to custom, stripped-down libraries.

Based on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r1 (Woody)

Linux Kernel 2.4.20 with IPv6 modules

HostAP 0.0.2 and utils

bridge-tools

djbdns caching dns server

NoCatAuth running as nonroot user, post 0.81 nightly

openSSH server 3.4p1

openSSL 0.9.6c patched

pcmcia-cs

ppp and pppoe

Zebra 0.92a-5

There are also a number of shell niceties,
including wget, elvis, tcpdump, perl, and even lynx. It runs well on
every Soekris model, and will spawn a serial console on those
machines (or any machine that has a serial port available). It runs
on virtually any 486 class machine (or better) with at least 32 MB
RAM. If you don't need all of the functionality
provided in the standard distribution, you can easily strip out the
components you don't need, to fit it into an even
smaller space. For example, eliminating Perl, NoCatAuth, djbdns, and
a couple of nonessential shell utilities will easily let Pebble fit
on a 32 MB flash card (although since 128 MB flash cards are now
selling for $20, perhaps this is something of a waste of effort).

If you are running from flash memory, one of the most useful features
in Pebble is that it mounts the bootable medium read only, and
creates a temporary RAM disk for its temporary files. This means that
once it is configured, the flash is never written to, which
considerably extends the lifetime of your flash.

Since it is based on Debian, you can easily install and remove
packages using the standard apt-get utility.
Pebble is under active development, with contributions from many
interested embedded networkers. If you can spare the tiny amount of
space required for Pebble, I highly recommend trying it for your own
access point application.