Michael - I still haven't installed this PC for my parents yet, hopefully tomorrow (Friday) however the delay has allowed me more time to tinker with the configuration! I've been setting it up in my "machine room" (2 servers and one PC going 24x7) which is relatively noisy so I hadn't given any attention to the noise this little box was making (mainly because I couldn't actually hear it!). However taking it to a quiet room and firing it up made me realise it was unacceptably noisy, due mainly to the antiquated 10Gb Western Digital Caviar hard disk, but also the slimline CD drive - both drives are excessively noisy - fine for an office, but not for a lounge!
With a little more effort - and a new hard drive - I've now got SlimCD 1.5 set up on this circa 2000 Compaq SFF 533Mhz P3/256Mb RAM machine running *totally* silent as the P3 is cooled passively leaving only the slow spinning PSU fan and hard disk (a new Hitachi 80GB Deskstar - very quiet) to make any noise. With SlimCD running from the slimline CD drive, the disk would be accessed periodically requiring the CD drive to spin up and in a lounge situation this would be very noticeable, so the CD drive also had to go! First of all I tried installing SlimCD to a 1Gb ext2 partition (journalled ext3 boot partitions are not supported by DSL) but found that the PC would stall on each subsequent boot if the previous shutdown had not been clean... since this was to be a headless/foolproof unit (ie. unexpected power downs are to be expected), this was not acceptable. Oddly, even initiating a "clean" shutdown from a command prompt would still result in filesystem problems on the next boot (with consequent stall), but worse still an unclean shutdown (ie. power off) would result in major filesystem corruption on the next boot - not good! I tried configuring the root partition as a read-only filesystem but this doesn't seem possible with my limited skills, so I gave up on that idea. I had to find a way to boot without CD and hard disk... unfortunately this aged SFF doesn't support booting from USB!! :( I thought about using an IDE-to-Compact Flash adapter on which to install the root filesystem but a) didn't have time to obtain one and b) not sure if CF would be suitable for the root filesystem as it would be hosting /tmp and could conceivably "wear out". Also, it still would be mounted read-write and potentially suffer from filesystem errors when the system is not shutdown cleanly. Luckily the SFF had a floppy drive and as a last resort I managed to create a boot floppy using the info 'here' (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Boot_Floppies) which allows the PC to boot Linux then haul in the SlimCD image (~100Mb) from the USB pendrive - even on a USB 1.00 port the performance hit is not noticeable. The SlimCD CD image can be copied to the pen drive using the boot option "dsl tohd=/dev/sda1" (the full set of DSL boot options or "cheat codes" can be found 'here' (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Cheat_Codes)). This approach actually works out better for me than the normal SlimCD CD boot loader as I can now customise the boot configuration on the floppy (eg. setting initial VGA resolution, enabling DMA and startup daemons). The floppy is only required for the initial boot, so there is no whirring or chirpping from the floppy drive once the system is up and running. In theory if I want to give my parents an updated SlimCD image I simply need to update their pen drive - although not sure if it will be that easy in practice - however with a 256Mb pen drive and each SlimCD image consuming approximately 100Mb it should be possible to trial a new image while keeping the original as a backup. I've setup an ext3 journalled partition on the 80Gb drive for music (this survives unclean shutdowns without a hitch!) along with betaftpd (to add music), sshd (for me to login and configure) and cron running ntpdate on the hour every hour (to maintain correct time). I've updated Slim Server to the 6.2 nightly from 24 December and saved this in my configuration on the pen drive so that it is restored on each boot (my backup.tar.gz config is now just under 10Mb). I guess what I'm saying is that the DSL/Knoppix/SlimCD concept is incredibly versatile, and for anyone wanting to build a dedicated Slimserver (using old PC hardware) this is definately the way to go! The sooner I can get this installed in my parents lounge the sooner I can stop tinkering and finding cool new things to do with it!!!! :) Many thanks for all your efforts putting this together! -- Milhouse ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Milhouse's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=928 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18942 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
