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Topic: Best way of installing to CF, Frugal install to CF with no caching< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
dvisor Offline





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Posted: July 11 2005,08:46 QUOTE

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
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adssse Offline





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Posted: July 11 2005,15:38 QUOTE

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.
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ke4nt1 Offline





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Posted: July 11 2005,16:18 QUOTE

...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
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adssse Offline





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Posted: July 11 2005,17:07 QUOTE

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?
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adssse Offline





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Posted: July 12 2005,19:44 QUOTE

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.
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