On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 09:28:11 +1200 Stephen Irons wrote: > Andrew Errington wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Has anyone on the list made their own boot CD? > > > > I want to do the following on a laptop with no hard drive: > > > > 1) Boot from CD > > 2) Load X > > 3) Mount an NFS share > > 4) Start a slideshow of image files found on the share > > > > That's it. > > > > I just spent some time replacing the CCFL in a laptop display, and that, > > plus the guts of the laptop, will be installed within a picture frame to > > make a 'walltop' or live photo frame. Yes, all the cool kids were doing > > that last year... > > > > I decided I don't need a hard drive, but I can't do a remote boot from a > > PCMCIA card, and I certainly don't want to bother with a floppy. I suppose > > I could try and boot from a USB stick, but I don't think the old laptop > > BIOS supports it. > > > > The whole thing should be silent- once the CD spins down there will only be > > the occasional whine of the CPU fan. Also, no need for an orderly > > shutdown- just pull the plug. Turning it on again might be tricky though, > > I don't think the BIOS has 'boot after power failure'. > > > > Anyone tried it? Knoppix used to be the best base for this sort of > > roll-your-own project. Is there anything easier/better now? > > > > Thanks in advance, > > > > Andrew > > > I recently replaced the HDD in an old notebook PC with a 512MB compact > flash card and a 2.5" to CF adaptor. Not cheap: the adapter was $20 > including postage from a crowd in Australia, and flash cards of a useful > size are $40 or more. > > But it boots quickly and is eerily quiet: not a sound to be heard as it > starts up. > > Stephen
is it running a rw filesystem on the flash card? This is widely regarded as a "bad thing" given the limited write life of flash. However if you look at voyage (http://www.voyage.hk ) they do a debian system which runs in a read only disk with the rw portions being in ramdisk. Its a debian based system and it is possible to simply apt-get additional software (after making the flash disk rw, then after all config etc is done you make it ro again) voyage is designed as a router/access point, but there seems to be no reason why you cannot get it to do other things. By the way you do not need X to view photos. You might like to look at geexbox, which does photos and movies in a framebuffer. It is a 6MB image, easily loaded to flash or cd or hard drive. It runs entirely in ramdisk after bootup. A few changes to the base system start up scripts and it will do what you want. -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
