Flash-based linux (was Re: [pc110] Installing from parallel Zip drive)

Isaac Salpeter (isaac nospam at d2.com)
Fri, 25 Jun 1999 10:19:57 -0700

Alan Cox wrote:
>
> That gives you a pretty good choice of distributions then, although disk space
> will be tight unless you go around weeding out stuff. For reference I've
> got a fairly full dist on a 340Mb drive, and a very cut down dist on a
> 150Mb. I keep meaning to try putting mulinux on the internal flash

Didn't have much luck with mulinux, but cLIeNUX works well on a 48 meg
CF card. I wasn't able to install the latest version (needs 12 megs RAM
for a ramdisk install), so I installed the older UMSDOS version, then
tarred it up, reformatted the CF as ext2, and dumped it back. This
distro is aimed at newbies, but is the best small (~25 meg) distribution
I've found. It includes a C only gcc setup, so kernel builds work fine.
It needs some tweaking (mainly apm/pcmcia tools installed), and has no X
(not a big deal for my purposes), though.

Also, I wouldn't have gotten this much working without tomsrtbt, a
single-floppy system with all the necessary tools and pcmcia support.

Anyone else running a decent flash-based system on a CF card? Got
tarballs to share?

-Isaac

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