TLUG Mailing List

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 20:38, Kyle Hasegawa <kylehase@example.com> wrote:

Now I just need to figure out the best way to install Linux on a CF
card. A quick search suggests that no swap partition and logging to
tmpfs are advisable. Some even recommend mounting the CF as read-only.

Other good ideas in the area of minimizing writes to the CF card are to mount with the "noatime" option and also use a non-journaling filesystem such as ext2.

Read-only is really the best if you can get there but it'll take a bit of work to get right especially if you're planning on doing it from scratch. I rebuilt my home NAS a while back, wanting to use it's internal disks exclusively for data and relegate the OS to a usb stick so was looking at similiar things a little while back. One project that does the read-only thing is the Debian Live project. http://live.debian.net/ They basically have a framework for allowing you to build your own customized images of Debian which run in a "live" fashion. Which basically means no changes are ever written to your storage device unless you explicitly tell it to save any changes you've made, through a script which writes out your changes. It uses a multi-layered, overlay filesystem, Aufs I believe, to save your changes. http://aufs.sourceforge.net/

I used Debian Live for a while and it worked well, but, well, I'm a tinkerer and moved onto just installing Fedora on the usb stick, with an ext2 fs, noatime mount options and the /var filesystem loopback mounted from a fs file that resides on the nas's SATA HD's.

Another project you may find interesting in building your own customized embedded linux is:

http://www.t2-project.org/

I've not had the chance to play with it but plan to at some point.

Have fun!

Re: [tlug] Linux appliance deal