[plug] Mini-ITX Systems...

Craig Ringer craig at postnewspapers.com.au
Tue Sep 17 17:42:24 WST 2002


Brad Campbell wrote:
> Trevor Phillips wrote:
> 
>>*nod*
>>Knoppix includes about 1.8Gig of stuff on a compressed ISO, and boots quite
>>fast, considering it's off CD.
>>Big flash cards are still bloody expensive. I'm trying to keep my project on
>>the cheap side. ^_^
>>
>>
>>>>How fast would it be before X? ie; for a text only session?
>>>
>>>Err.. Well because the entire system is in RAM, X takes about 1 second
>>>to start up, so not much quicker really. (This is on a 1Ghz Celeron)
>>
>>So you expand the card drive into a RAM disk then? (Rather than just mount the
>>compressed drive image directly off the Flash)
> 
> 
> Yep, I have a minimal e2fs on the CF card that contains a
> staticly compiled busybox,

Does anybody on list know of an "internal compression" system for 
binaries for linux? You know, you run a program over a binary and it 
wraps the original in a simple program that decompresses the real binary 
into memory? Or is that just not worth it when you can use gzip directly 
from a shell script?

I know it used to rock on old macs pressed for space.

> The great part about doing it this way is I can have a network upgrade
> function with a failsafe boot system that never changes, and I can
> upgrade the kernel without having to re-lilo the CF card.

Cool. Is it possible to boot most desktops off a CF reader? If so, what 
kind - pcmcia (via pci expansion), USB, or what? It'd be _very_ nice for 
thin clients to have an internal CF card.




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