Installing DSL on a CF card

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Installing DSL on a CF card
started by: bsparks

Posted by bsparks on July 31 2005,17:58

To make a long story short, I'm trying to make a digital picture frame, because I'm too cheap to go out and buy one. I have an extra laptop sitting around that has a dead hard drive, so here's the plan: I'm trying to make this project as simple as possible so points of failure are reduced. To that end, and since the machine has a bad hard drive, I have ordered a IDE to CF adapter and a 512mb CF card. I know that CF cards have a limited life expectancy, so I'm planning to just use the card like the DSL CD--boot off of it, and run applications. All of the pictures will be downloaded through my wired/wireless network for display as they are needed (map the drive to a share on another computer). The computer that I'm planning on using as the frame has 192 meg of RAM, so this prompts the question: Do I really need a swap file? I don't have a place to put it, even though the CF card has a lifetime warranty (from Kingston), I'd rather not test that theory and put undue wear on it, and I certainly (if at all possible) do not want a hard drive running.

How can I install to the CF card so that the system is bootable without a swap file? Do I just follow the hard drive install procedures on the site but not create hda1 as a swap partition?

Thanks in advance for your help.

--Branson

Posted by kopsis on July 31 2005,18:54

It's highly unlikely that you'll actually need swap for what you're trying to do. Just skip any instructions about creating a swap partition. DSL will boot just fine without one.

Posted by bsparks on July 31 2005,18:58

Awesome... Thanks for your quick reply. So basically the CF card will have one ext2 partition--the one for the OS?

I'll keep everyone posted about the status of the project if you are interested... I will start on it this within a week or two, as I am currently out of town and planning ahead. It's great to be out of town because you don't have to wait for all of your parts to show up in the mail--by the time you get home, everything is there ready for you to start!

Posted by mgmont on Aug. 01 2005,01:27

I have been running two computers using a cf with no hard drive and no swap for a couple of months now. Both work great. The only problems you might have is if you try to load a program that requires a lot of ram memory. This is where a swap file is necessary as it acts as an extension of ram memory. Naturally you would not want a swap file on your cf as would put cause extra wear on your cf. My two computers have 256 meg of ram which has worked fine for nearly all the things that I want to do. I configured my cf with two partitions one (hda1) with about 60 megs where I did a frugal install and the rest for hda2 which I designated for mydsl and backup/restore. I also created a /optional directory on hda2. Running this way is extremely fast. Much better than from a hard drive.

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 01 2005,02:53

Just do a normal "Frugal install" on your compact flash "hard drive".

Frugal install is perfect for flash memory devices because it keeps the filesystem as read-only and all caching is done in the ramdisk. This virtually eliminates flash memory failure due to too many writes. You can still save some of your settings files to the CF device using the normal Backup/Restore process. This creates a backup.tar.gz file on your CF device that contains your chosen files.

The backup is done during shutdowns and it is restored automatically at bootup.

FYI, there are some similar projects that have been explained here on the forums.

Try searching for keyword:

picture AND frame

and search ALL FORUMS and FROM THE BEGINNING or NEWER.

Posted by bsparks on Aug. 01 2005,02:54

Thanks everyone for your quick replies. I'll keep everyone posted of the project as I start it this weekend.

I highly recommend using the quality "search" feature on the board... I didn't do so, and now that I have, all of my questions and then some have been answered... Thanks to everyone that put up with my n00bness.

--Branson