Damn Small Linux - Not!

Bob3

I've heard about doing a "frugal install" on a compactflash card, can't seem to find any commentary about it though.
Can anyone point me to some reading material on the subject?
tanx in advance~

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

I frequently install to compact flash.
However, I use a CF-IDE adaptor to do the install.
I unplug my hard drive, and plug in the CF-IDE with compact flash.
Therefore the CF appears as hda and the frugal grub or frugal lilo is trivial.
Once complete, I install the CF into the target machine.

I have no usb card readers so I cannot comment on installation using such devices.

Bob3 · Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 11:05 pm Post subject: hmmm ...

I've got a few of those CF to IDE adapters, sounds like a good option.
We have a pile of Itronix rough service laptops; no CD or floppy drives, but the pcmcia slot is bootable & a CF card in a pcmcia adapter is frequently used to reload operating systems, usually that darn windows stuff. I've gotten spoiled using Linux programs like GParted & etc to prepare other HDs that have been wiped/reformatted & was trying to figure out a way to do the laptop's prep using Linux.
I take it that DSL, being Debian based, should be GParted friendly?
The little laptops have [ +/- ] 266mhz processors & 32mb of ram, so a "frugal install" on a CF card would be in order, eh?

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

Quite honestly, a 266Mhz with 32MB memory would probably be better off running DSL and not DSL-N.
DSL-N being mostly gtk2 and larger apps would be very slow running in 32MB and no swap.

ethyr2000 · Joined: 08 Jun 2006 Posts: 9

I have a nice little embedded board 500 Mhz Crusoe with 320MB of ram. A unique feature is it has an IDE-CF slot built in. And to top it off, I've acquired an 8GB (yes that's Gigabyte) CF card.

I'm thinking the best configuration is to run from the CF with a ramdisk used for /tmp and /var. Obviously, I need to balance ramdisk space vs. writes to my CF.

I'm thinking I need a blend of Frugal and a traditional HD install. Is DSL-N a good choice for this. Or would I be better off setting up a custom "live-cd" on my CF?

Thanks for the help and advice.

[IDC]Dragon · Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 41 Location: Hannover, Germany

Well, what's the application? 8GB CF is a lot, DSL-N would feel very lonely in there. Wink

Bob3 · Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2006 7:50 pm Post subject:

[quote="[IDC]... 8GB CF is a lot, DSL-N would feel very lonely in there. Wink

[/quote]I'm jealous, my first machine with a HD had under a gig. Laughing

I first got around to downloading [a recent release of] DSL this AM, going to try a CF (pretending to be a HD) install using one of the adapters as suggested. I got spoiled with the GUI goodies on stuff like QTparted.
Maybe this afternoon can have some 'spare time' to allow me to mess around a bit more.
Rolling Eyes

ethyr2000 · Joined: 08 Jun 2006 Posts: 9

>"'... 8GB CF is a lot, DSL-N would feel very lonely in there. ' I'm jealous, >my first machine with a HD had under a gig. "

My first computer had an 80MB HD. So this in many ways is amazing.
I have an embedded board with a built-in IDE-compact flash adapter. It also has 500Mhz Crusoe, 320MB RAM, VGA, NIC, USB 1.1, 2 Serial port, FDD and IDE, parallel port, audio, PC104(+). I'm seriously considering looking for a PC104+ USB 2.0 card. I'd like it to run linux using the CF instead of a HD. I've had difficulty in the past with my USB cdrom drive, so even if I have a lot of space on the CF - it allows the option of putting the cdrom iso on the flash if necessary.

1) I don't need the /, /boot, /root, /usr, directory compressed with 8GB.
2) But I do need to have /tmp, /var, /opt, /home on tmpfs. As I don't have swap, this is a delicate balance. -- Like DSL
3) log files, unneeded var files are stripped and no longer written to - except for serious "critical"errors
4) I also need to save the tmpfs paths on shutdown - like DSL

I was interested in DSL-N because it doesn't have excess apps. So I wouldn't have to thin down a standard distribution. Also items 2 & 3 should already be done. DSL-N also allows me to use apt-get to add other packages I may want.

This is why I was thinking DSL-N may be a good solution. But it would require an install that's a blend of HD and frugal to accomplish this. I'm planning on using FVWM for my graphical environment.

Bob3 · Posted: Fri Jun 09, 2006 7:22 pm Post subject:

Heck, with a whole 8gig CF drive you could use dang near any distro you wanted; most full installs are happy with 1.5gb so you'd even have enough room to rip a DVD if ya wanted. Twisted Evil

My first computer was an IBM PC jr; had to have that flashy color monitor. Wink

ethyr2000 · Joined: 08 Jun 2006 Posts: 9

I think I've figured my solution. And you're right - I can use any regular distribution (provided I don't overload it with applications that serve the same purpose). But I'll have to use tmpfs, unionfs, and pivot root to create a writable area of memory to prevent damaging my flash card.

1) create tmpfs
2) make a unionfs of tmpfs and /
3) pivot_root to reassign system / path to unionfs

ethyr2000 · Joined: 08 Jun 2006 Posts: 9

One more thing I'll have to figure out... how to copy desired files from tmpfs to the original / for later use.

[IDC]Dragon · Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 41 Location: Hannover, Germany

Other Linux Live CDs/DVDs can do something close to the "frugal install" of DSL(-N). Not exacly as nice, to comfort our dear developers. Wink

You can format your CF card with ext2, copy the contents of e.g. the Knoppix5 DVD to your CF card, install grub on it, editiboot/grub/menu.lst and maybe device.map to use the proper device to load the kernel from.
Then your CF card will boot and behave like the live DVD (ramdisk and unionfs), only much faster.

For me poor soul only blessed with a 1GB card, I've done that with the Knoppix5 CD and Kanotix. Being a noob, I got stuck with remounting the partition as writeable and persisting changes to it.

ethyr2000 · Joined: 08 Jun 2006 Posts: 9

I'll have to study Knoppix 5's installation. Using a DVD I hope they don't implement anything like the toram for dsl or what puppy does by default. I'm not even sure I want Knoppix because why have anything compressed on the drive? Just keep my install fairly thin.