Best way of installing to CF

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Best way of installing to CF
started by: dvisor

Posted by dvisor on July 11 2005,08:46

Hi

Please excuse my ignorance if these questions seem basic, but I'm new to Linux and DSL, and having trouble putting all the info together.

I have put together a mini-ITX machine with a CD-ROM, 256 Mb RAM, and a 128Mb compactflash on an IDE converter - no hard disk. Apart from the CD, this machine is dead silent as it has no fans at all. Booting from the CD works well, as does performing a frugal install to the CF card and booting from that.

The problem is that I have just heard that CF cards only stand a limited number of writes, so I'm a little concerned about the caching, and backups etc. When I re-ran the frugal install I specified "toram" as the only boot option to speed things up a little, and thought that this would prevent writes to the CF. However, when I change the Firefox homepage etc and make a few other modifications, these changes are remembered the next time I boot - so it must still be writing to the CF.

Could someone recommend the best way of performing a frugal install, please? I would like to make a few modifications the first time I run it from the CF (such as setting up Sylpheed, homepage, and installing a couple of MyDSL extensions), but after that, I would like it completely read only.

Many thanks

Posted by adssse on July 11 2005,15:38

From what I understand on a compact flash card you would not want to use a persistent /home or /opt directories and you would not want to use a swap as these would all cause high wear on your device. I believe you could set up hda1 for your filesystem and hda2 for mydsl and backup/restore. That way it would look for and load your extension files at boot and backup everything when you shutdown, but would not be writing to the device all the time. I have not done this myself so please correct me if I am wrong.

Posted by ke4nt1 on July 11 2005,16:18

...adssse catches on to this DSL stuff quickly... nice..

Continue to use the "toram" option, as this will improve
performance, and reduce CF disk access..
( writes will write to the ramspace, not the CF. )

If you feel an application(s) would eat up a large portion
of your ram, only then would I run it without the "toram" option..

Remember, with no swap partition or swapfile,
once you run out of inodes, ram, etc.. your hosed..

If in doubt, run a manual backup prior to exploring
the limits, or running unfamiliar or multiple applications.

73
ke4nt

Posted by adssse on July 11 2005,17:07

Thanks for the help ke4nt1, forgot to talk about toram.
I have been thinking about trying frugal on cf, but was wondering if it would be a better setup than my hd. I dont have much ram in my old system so I am using a swap partition on the hd and it concerns me that I would not be able to do this with cf. That along with the fact that I would still have to purchase the adapter and cf card have made me hesitent to try it. Are cf setups better suited towards pc's with larger amounts of ram?

Posted by adssse on July 12 2005,19:44

I actually have another question in addition to the ones above. I am not sure which cf adapter I would need for my desktop either. I believe that I would need a 40 pin, but there are two different ones.

Posted by mgmont on July 13 2005,00:14

Adssse, the 44 pin adapter is made to plug directly into a laptop hard drive slot. The 40 pin model plugs into a standard ide hard drive cable. I now have both. My hard drive died in this laptop that I am presently using and I am running a frugal install on a 512 mb CF partitioned with 60 mb for hda1 and the balance for hda2. I have mydsl, backup/restore, and opt on hda2. The laptop is maxed out at 256 mb of ram so I am not using the toram option because I found out the hard way that it is easy to use up your ram and crash the system with only 256mb.

I am also using a similar setup on small mini ITX type system and use the 40 pin model on this system. So far both systems work great as long as I do not try running too many apps at once since I have no swap in either system.

Posted by mgmont on July 13 2005,01:35

While we are on this subject, wouldn't it be neat to have a ram disk card that could plug in to the ide bus like the cf adapters do. You could use the cf as the master and the ram disk as slave. You could have a large cf partitioned with about 50 or 60 mb for frugal and the rest for ram disk backup. The ram disk could have your home, opt, mydsl and a large swap file. You could have a script that would set up the ram disk partitions and copy the contents of the second partition of your cf to the ram disk at boot up and have another script to copy the ram disk back to the cf to save your changes when you shut down.

This would be great for ram challenged older systems and also there would be no motors to run. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?

Posted by adssse on July 13 2005,03:31

Thanks for the reply mgmont. I am thinking about buying the adapter and the cf card. My hardrives are still going strong (knock on wood) but it just interests me and I kinda want to try it. The only concern of mine is running out of ram like you were talking about. I have 128mb right now and since it is an old computer it is maxed out.