BBBS is a full featured bbs program that is available for many platforms that includes full Fidonet and Internet support(See the BBBS home page, http://www.bbbs.net for details.)
The version I am useing is the one for Linux/i386. Originally I had it installed on a Slackware v3.4 system, but when the new version (v3.42 1s) came out I needed a Linux distribution that supported the new libc6 (glibc) libraries. I originally choose Red Hat for that, because at the time I had a CD for that distribution already.
Because BBBS supports so much in itself, I decided to find out just how much of a minimal install of linux was needed to run BBBS. What I plan to do is do a minimal linux install, & then install BBBS on it.
The problem with Red Hat is that it just doesn't seem possible to do a really minimal install of it; at least, not easily. I tried a minimal install of Red Hat (only have about 470 megs total available on the machine I tried it on), & it installed all kinds of things I didn't want or need on the system (including XFree86 librarys). At the time I decided to move BBBS to it's own box, I had the Red Hat Install sitting at about 160 megs: could pare it down some more, but it would take time because would have to check any other affected pkgs, to see if I needed to keep them.
So when I decided to put BBBS on it's own box, I figured I'd use a distribution that supports minimal installs easier. Thought about using a newer Slackware distribution, but I had heard alot of good things about the Debian distribution so I decided to go with it.
The situation was that I was putting together a system based on an old P60; had just bought a drive for it (WD 1.6 gig), but didn't get another cd rom drive. Also only had a 5 1/4" floppy drive to use on it. Did the install using NFS, from another of my systems that does have a CD rom drive; didn't do the install off of the cd (didn't feel like typeing in those long paths...
'Course, when they say "base" they mean it... Basic funtionality, including tcp/ip, is there; but not much else... Still need to decide what other pkgs's to install on that system & get them on there... For use with BBBS, it will not need very much at all... I will install Perl, but what else will actually be needed I'll be finding out. More info on that as I do it...
One thing to note is that the default hosts.allow & hosts.deny files basically disallow things like telneting into the system. The hosts.allow file needs to be changed, to allow in what you need. While setting it up, I basically allow anything in from my local lan.
