Software Map

Etherboot is a free software package for making
boot ROMs for booting Linux and other operating
systems on x86, Itanium, Hammer, and Hyperstone
machines over a network using Internet protocols,
namely DHCP and tftp.

tomsrtbt is the most Linux on one floppy disk for rescue recovery panic and emergencies, contains tools to keep in your shirt pockets, is useful whenever you can't use a hard drive and contains about 100 rescue tools.

Timo's rescue CD set provides an easy way to generate bootable CDROMs with a ready-to-use rescue system on them. The system is designed to be fully customizable and easy to build. The rescue system includes reiserfs, parted, partimage, nmap, w3m, bash, sshd, telnetd, ftpd, and nfsd. It is based on Debian's "Sarge" release. LILO, syslinux, isolinux, and GRUB are supported. The project is evolving more and more into a "Debian on CD" project, which means that its use is not limited to a rescue CD; it is also possible to install a whole Debian system on CD.

The Epoch Init System is an init system for Linux designed with ease of configuration and non-intrusiveness in mind. It has no external dependencies besides libc and pthreads on a Linux 2.6+ system, though a working /bin/sh is suggested. It's suitable for large and small Linux distributions, but was designed with a focus on smaller Linux systems. It's features include a log system capable of recording boot events before the filesystem is made writable, ASCII runlevels, a convenient, single configuration file setup, automatic hostname setting at boot, automatic virtual filesystem mounting (think /proc), PID file support, stuck job killing during bootup and shutdown, integrated color greeting banner support, and automatic service restart support, to keep vital services running at all times.

Suspend2 allows you to hibernate your machine without needing APM, BIOS, or ACPI support. It creates an image that is saved in your active swap partitions, swap files, ordinary files or (soon) across a network. At the next system boot, the kernel detects the saved image, restores the memory from it and then it continues to run as if you'd never powered down.

/etc/net represents a new approach to Linux network configuration tasks. Inspired by the limitations of traditional network configuration subsystems, /etc/net provides built-in support for configuration profiles, interface name management, removable devices, full iproute2 command set, interface dependencies resolution, QoS, and firewall configuration frameworks. /etc/net provides support for the following interface types: ethernet, WiFi (WEP), IPv4/IPv6 tunnels, PSK IPSec tunnels, VLAN, PLIP, ethernet bonding and bridging, traffic equalizer, Pent@NET, Pent@VALUE, SkyStar-2, TUN/TAP, OpenVPN TUN/TAP, usbnet, and PPP. Due to its modular structure, support for new interface types can be added without overall design changes.

runit is a cross-platform Unix init scheme with service supervision; a replacement for sysvinit and other init schemes. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris, and can easily be adapted to other Unix operating systems. runit implements a simple three-stage concept. Stage 1 performs the system's one-time initialization tasks. Stage 2 starts the system's uptime services (via the runsvdir program). Stage 3 handles the tasks necessary to shutdown and halt or reboot.

ethwireck can detect if the physical layer of the
Ethernet is up. Laptops which use dynamic IP
address assignment via DHCP have the problem that
the boot process is much longer when no wire is
connected to the Ethernet card. This is because
the startup scripts have to wait for the DHCP
request to time out. ethwireck can be used in the
init script for your network card to determine
whether or not an interface should be brought up.
In other words, a timeout is avoided.

Autopoweroff is a script that shuts down a
computer at a specific time, but only if some
conditions are met. It works well on home
routers/firewalls where the machine can be
switched off every night and powered back up in
the morning. It can be configured to only shut
down the server after any computers which depend
on the server for Internet access have been shut
down.