Install on Compact Flash

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Install on Compact Flash
started by: ryansturmer

Posted by ryansturmer on Nov. 06 2005,15:48

So I'm sort of distro-shopping for a linux system to put in a mobile robot, and I'm wondering if DSL is right for me, here are my requirements, and some questions:

small (I think we're using a 512MB Flash card)
fast
minimal writes to flash (running in RAM)
extensible
remasterable (so we can do quick reinstalls)

Questions:

DSL uses the 2.4.26 kernel... is the use of 2.6 possible? Extra space be damned, can I compile a new kernel and drivers and stick them in there?

When we run "in ram" what exactly does that mean? Is the filesystem kept in RAM? how does it affect the erase cycles on my flash device, and how can I keep that minimized?

The myDSL system looks good, but from reading the wiki, I understand that I can use the conventional apt-get to install debian packages? Is that true? How well does it work? Can I do that with a 'frugal install?'

What exactly is the 'frugal install'? Am I uncompressing the CD image into RAM on the fly? or am I doing the whole thing at boot time?

For reference, the CPU in our bot is a full-fledged SBC will a gig of ram 2ghz pentium M, usb, gigabit ethernet etc... it just has fairly limited storage, and it's flash, so we don't want to be rewriting it all the time.

Meanwhile, I'm downloading DSL and giving it a shot.

Cheers!

-Ryan

Posted by hawki on Nov. 06 2005,16:12

Hi
I do a lot of what you want to do with a lot less hardware. I use a 300Mhz thin client, with 192M mem., and 512M CF.
The CF is partitioned 64M for frugal install on /dev/hda1 and the rest on /dev/hda2 for extensions and backup files.
The boot to ram copies the compressed image into ram and everthing runs there. I do not use a swap partition so nothing gets written to my CF while in operation. Most of the extensions I use are .uci files so they are on /dev/hda2 but are read only. Again no writes to CF. I use the backup/restore functionallity in DSL to save my current environment. That is written to CF but only during shutdown/reboot.
Good luck

Posted by ryansturmer on Nov. 07 2005,02:39

So when running in RAM, writes to disk only occur at shutdown/reboot? Is there a way to force these writes? (One would imagine a slight code revision that needed to be saved without doing a full reboot)