[Xastir] mobile computer

[Curt Mills]

On Thu, 13 May 2004, N1OFZ wrote:

> I just got a new "used" car this weekend.  I disconnect the OnStar
> system and patched into the Motorola Oncore GPS.  I also have a 533MHz
> fanless 12V computer (10.25"(D) x 8.25"(W) x 2.5"(H)) that is going to
> be mounted under the passenger seat.
>
> What I need to know is what Xastir friendly Linux distro is the
> smallest.  I have a 256MB flash disk w/ IDE interface that I was going
> to use as the main drive in the machine.  This way when the car turns
> on, Linux boots from the flash drive.  No moving parts and quick boot.
> Does anyone know of a distro w/ X that will fit into about 256MB?  My
> other thought is to put in an extra 10GB laptop that I have.  By doing
> this I can load the kernel (and whatever else I can cram into the 256)
> on the flash drive and everything else on the hd.  Thoughts?  Comments?

I've gone through this exercise.  There are some gotcha's that you
might want to be aware of.  I started with a device that had a 205MB
or so removable flash drive and a much smaller flash drive that's
integrated onto the motherboard.  Through the CMOS setup I can
switch which one is the boot drive.

So... Took out the removable, put in a hard drive instead (needed
lots of space for maps), made it be the first drive, and the Linux
kernel still wouldn't boot.  Turns out there's a small bit of code
in the kernel that checks for flash devices.  If any are found on
the first two IDE drives, nothing will mount read/write on either of
those two drives.  Because I couldn't disable that small bit of
flash on /dev/hdb, I couldn't mount /dev/hda read/write.  I had to
go in to the kernel source and disable that check so that I could
boot /dev/hda.  I did this by removing the drive and putting it in a
skeleton desktop I use for such purposes.

2nd thing:  You're going to want to mount your flash drive read-only
most of the time.  If you don't, you'll wear out the flash.  They're
good for an infinite number of reads, but a limited number of
writes.  There are also flash filesystems out there that will walk
writes across the drive in order to try to preserve the drive for
the longest time possible.

As far as small distributions, I'd probably start with the zipslack
distribution, which fits in 100mb, then add some of the "X" series
of disks to get X11 on there.  You can later take off some of the
packages you don't need in order to free up a bit more.  Zipslack
will give you a full development environment, text-based.  Add X11
to it and you'll have something more familiar.  I'd suggest FVWM2
window manager for something small/fast/light.  It's what I use on
all my computers.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
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