Re: [pc110] various questions

Fred L. Templin (templin nospam at erg.sri.com)
Fri, 23 Jan 1998 09:39:04 -0800

Alan,

> 2) I intend to exclusively run Unix, almost certainly Linux, though
> as I run FreeBSD on my home machine(s) I might try that (others on the
> Japanese pc110-lovers list seem to have had some success with this).
> As regards compact flash am I right in assuming "compact flash" and
> "pico flash" mean the same thing? There seems to be 32M (and soon
> 40M) compact flash cards out that work in the PSION does any one
> know if these will work with the PC110. Even if they don't could
> someone give me the part number of their 15M pico flash card that does
> work and sources in the UK (though I reckon I'd buy from the US)
>
> 3) I'd like to use an PCMCIA ethercard (maybe a modem/ethernet combined)
> Has anyone had any success (or not) with any specific cards

There are already quite a few notes on Linux on the PC110 on the WWW, so I'll
try to address the FreeBSD question. I am running FreeBSD on the PC110 here in
my office, but it took quite a bit of hacking to get my configuration working.
I needed to keep both PC-CARD slots open for I/O options on my PC110, so that
eliminated the possibility of using PCMCIA non-volatile storage devices.
Instead, I use a 15MB CompactFlash card to hold my '/' filesystem and mount
'/usr', '/var and '/tmp' over the network via NFS. But, this configuration
required that I modify the FreeBSD boot floppy image to install just a minimal
'/' filesystem and no '/usr' filesystem, which required setting up an entire
FreeBSD release engineering source tree in my local environment.

Since it sounds like you need to keep only one PC-CARD slot open for an
Ethernet card, one possibility might be to get one of the PCMCIA Type
II-format SanDisk flash cards (See: www.sandisk.com). But, some problems you
might run into are:

1) I don't know whether the PC110 would recognize the Type II SanDisks or
not (it *should* recognize them, since they support the ATA interface)

2) I don't know whether using a Type II SanDisk in one of thePC-CARD slots
would disable the other slot or not

3) SanDisks are prohibitively expensive (I would guesstimate that ~100MB
worth of SanDisk would cost about as much as the PC110 itself!)

If you decide to go the SanDisk PC-CARD Type II route, I would recommend the
85MB card as a minimum for installing FreeBSD. (This should allow installing
the "minimum user" distribution from www.FreeBSD.org.) If you decide to go the
CompactFlash with NFS-mounts option, let me know if you'd like any further
hints and tips on how to set up FreeBSD to support this.

OK - good luck and enjoy your new PC110!

Fred
templin nospam at erg.sri.com