On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Iain Young wrote: > Hi All, > > I've seen a number of 'HOWTO' documents on installing Debian on > Compact Flash, but most of the ones I've seen deal with installing > it once, and using stable. > > Has anyone had any experience with using Sid, -and- keeping it > up to date with apt-get update and apt-get upgrade regularly ? > > How long do the modern CF cards last before they need to be replaced ? > Most of these machines would be router || dns || ldap type machines - > ie small, dedicated for a particular job, rather than general purpose, > or graphics. > > Any other tips ? I guess moving syslog to be over the network > might help, but I'd think the apt-getting would probably be more > costly in terms of CF life. > > I'm thinking of migrating my home machines to the Mini-ITX factor, > and so was considering going all the way, and doing without a hard > drive in most cases. > > (And yes, Im one of those nutters who like to have the leading > edge software) >
AFAIK, this technique is mainly used for "embedded" systems and I put the quotes there because one man's embedded system is another man's Cray. The CF disk normally would contain a kernel image, a compressed root filesystem, and a bootloader like 'syslinux' (on a i386-based system) that loads the kernel, then loads the filesystem image and then boots the kernel. The kernel is configured to have its root filesystem loaded as a ramdisk. The CF disk has a FAT 16 filesystem on it and is normally not mounted at all during operation. It can be mounted periodically to read/write configuration files that can be used to configure applications in the root filesystem (in the ramdisk). The advantages to this are that the filesystem image is virtually incorruptible and there is no harddisk to fail. Embedded systems are typically not "shutdown" nicely like a desktop or server, but are just switched off. This is very practical for "appliances" like you mention, but I would think impractical for a general-purpose desktop or server. I do not think that it is practical to maintain such a system as a Debian machine because the filesystem image that I have described must be "built" using a bunch of tools. My day job is developing routers and network communications devices for military applications and we've been using Linux in an embedded sense since about 1999. We did release an early product that was essentially a Debian filesystem (with a lot of stuff ripped out of it), but it was significantly larger in size than one can do by building one's own filesystem and is not really the way to go. I don't know what your background or desire is in terms of doing this, but my feeling is that one really needs to do some software development to build something like this. There are a lot of resources on the web about this, search for "embedded linux". There is also a great book on the subject, "Building Embedded Linux Systems", by Karim Yaghmour, that I highly recommend. There was a very interesting and useful project called the Linux Router Project that unfortunately is now dead, don't know about any spinoffs from it. This provided somewhat of a turnkey system like what you are describing. There is something called PTXdist <http://www.pengutronix.de> that is a developer's tool to provide a significant jumpstart to developing an embedded Linux system that you might check out. There is a Debian-related project called Emdebian <http://www.emdebian.org> also. Anyway, there is a TON of stuff on the web about embedded Linux and a lot of embedded distributions in various states. You'll need to do a little research and see what you can find that fits your application and interest level. Good luck... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]