Nick Rout wrote: > 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. > > Yes, it the filesystem is writeable, but I did it simply to verify that the CF+adapter would be a direct hardware replacement for the HDD, and it certainly is. The system is not in active use. The thing I wanted hanging on the wall was a day-night map of the world, similar to a Geochron.
Puppy linux and Ubuntu 6.10 live CD have solutions to making changes persistent when running off CD, using a USB flash drive to store modified data. This seems applicable to booting off a CF card too. Portable Thunderbird and Portable Firefox (Windows only) also try to reduce writes to the flash drive, and the Portable Apps project is busy with a Portable Linux which will have the same problem. There are lots of people working on it. Stephen ======================================================================= This email, including any attachments, is only for the intended addressee. It is subject to copyright, is confidential and may be the subject of legal or other privilege, none of which is waived or lost by reason of this transmission. If the receiver is not the intended addressee, please accept our apologies, notify us by return, delete all copies and perform no other act on the email. Unfortunately, we cannot warrant that the email has not been altered or corrupted during transmission. =======================================================================
