Re: [tlug] Linux appliance deal

[Kyle Hasegawa <kylehase@example.com>]

On 11/08/2010 11:17 PM, Romeo Theriault wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 20:38, Kyle Hasegawa <kylehase@example.com 
> <mailto: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.

Thanks for the tips.  I was able to install Debian Lenny on the CF 
(ext2) by sourcing several blogs and the official wiki.  I went with a 
pretty standard base install with some fstab edits, mostly from 
http://www.chrissearle.org/node/283

|#proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0 #<-This produces a mount error in Debian Lenny
/dev/hda1   /               ext2    noatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
tmpfs          /etc/network/run tmpfs defaults,noatime                   0 0
tmpfs          /tmp           tmpfs   defaults,noatime                   0 0
tmpfs          /var/lock      tmpfs   defaults,noatime                   0 0
tmpfs          /var/log       tmpfs   defaults,noatime                   0 0
tmpfs          /var/run       tmpfs   defaults,noatime                   0 0
tmpfs          /var/tmp       tmpfs   defaults,noatime                   0 0
|

There were a few other non-critical errors due to missing directories 
like /var/log/apt etc. which I may fix later with some startup scripts.  
I haven't tested audio since I've disabled it in the bios but everything 
else is working fine out of the box.

-Kyle