Hello angstrom-distro-users,
[cc: to developers too, as it raises corresponding issues. Please edit
cc: when replying.]
One of the things which greatly helped Linux popularity is the
concept of LiveCD, allowing even novice users to quickly boot Linux
without need for long and verbose installs, and generally see Linux in
the most user-friendly manner.
What we lack on handhelds IMHO is some analog of this
mechanism, allowing users to boot a distro in under dozen of clicks or
key presses. Ability to boot from a memory card can be seen as such
possibility, but actually it is not - comparing with ubiquitous ISOs,
there're less universal formats like TAR and EXT2 (for example,
Windows users are out), and number of keys to press is much larger
than a dozen.
So instead, the idea is to make a single-file bundle in the
native executable format of target system, which would store rootfs in
a ramdisk and boot from it. With such design, it would maximally
independent of environment, allowing allowing to perform one-click
boot.
I need to say that this concept is not new, and Hackndev (Palm
porting) developers released their builds in close format for quite
some time now. I'm unfortunately not know about details, as there're
clearly not enough communication and co-direction among porting
projects for different hardware platforms. What I'm sure about is that
OE lacks support for creating such images, and my aim is to add it, to
allow anyone to generate them easily, and elaborate the whole concept
further.
Of course, as it is clear from the description above, such
LiveRamdisks would be inherently platform-dependent, as need native
platform bootloader to handle initial phase of loading. Still,
there're good possibilities for reuse on Linux side, and it would be
very nice to stop reinventing the wheel, but work together on Angstrom
support for such features, based on it cross-platform and
cross-hardware aims.
In the meantime, I'd like to introduce concept LiveRamdisk for
HP iPaq hx4700. It is available by the link:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=173841&package_id=236343
Release notes:
--------------
This is LiveRamdisk for Angstrom distribution alpha snapshot. What is
LiveRamdisk? It is standalone executable file which allows you to boot
Linux on your PDA with a single click, without any preparation,
partitioning and formatting a storage card, editing configuration files,
etc. Few important notes:
1. Running Linux is equivalent of HARD RESET. You MUST BACKUP all your
data before running LiveRamdisk.
2. To return from Linux to native OS of your handheld, you must perform
another hard reset.
3. LiveRamdisk require sufficient amount of Program Memory to start.
Please adjust your setting to reserve 30Mb for it. If you don't have
enough memory, you may need to perform hard reset before starting
LiveRamdisk (nut after the backup, of course).
4. Please read all messages and questions carefully. Initial startup
may take several seconds, be patient. If there's no changes for some
time, try to close unneeded applications (File Manager for example),
maybe there's some window behind them.
--------------
--
Best regards,
Paul mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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