On 12/3/2016 7:05 AM, Jochen Spieker wrote:
Richard Owlett:
On 12/2/2016 4:21 PM, Jochen Spieker wrote:
Beware that this might slightly increase power usage / reduce battery
life. That's at least my observation from a couple of years ago.
Depenging on the hardware, an SD card can keep a bus alive that could be
put to sleep otherwise. But if I would have to guess this is not an
issue for your use case.
No problem for medium term. It will sit on my desk next to my "regular"
machine.
That's what I thought.
2. Can Debian itself reside on that medium?
I'm thinking in terms of changing look/feel/function/capabilities/...
of the machine by swapping media before "power up".
[The BIOS *DOES* have some capability to specify precedence of boot
devices.]
Debian doesn't really care, but you would have to test whether your BIOS
can really boot from SD cards.
If it "looks" the same as a USB flash device, there should be no problem.
For Linux the bus doesn't really matter. But again, for your BIOS it
does. As far as I understand, that's hardware specific. Some card
readers are internally wired to USB which gives you a good chance to
boot from it. As far as I can see on the ThinkWiki
(http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:R61 pointing to
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Ricoh_R5C843), the R61 is different.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T61-and-prior-T-series/Boot-T61p-from-SD-card/m-p/261121/highlight/true#M41072
looks like you are out of luck.
Maybe. May be not. I suspect most of what I was thinking of by
having Grub/LILO/??? reside on the HDD. The behind the scenes
motivation is create a "project" that will serve as a learning
experience.
