[luau] No hard drive, only compact flash card

[Kekoa Vincent]

Here's a cool example of how this would work in a small half-width 1U
server:

http://www.ant-computing.com/

You can make your own, but it's not easy, instructions on how they did
it are on the site.

> >I am very suprised no one sells PC like this.  All of the ones I found were
> >cash registers or the like, no general purpose PC's.  I would think this
> >would be great for routers, firewalls, etc.  High high availabilty stuff.
> 
> Given all of the limitations that have been described, I don't see how
> it's all that useful to use CF in a high-availability environment like
> a router or firewall.

But routers and firewalls run almost completely in RAM, if it had to
touch the drive at every network packet, that would bog down any network
considerably.  I think the utility of the CF reader in high availability
applications is totally legit, considering it would mainly be used as a
means of storing an operating system to boot up in between shut downs. 
Now if CF was used to _replace_ RAM(as in swap), then the limitations
would certainly bring the system to it's knees in high-availability
situations.  If it was a small little web server, I think it would be
cool to have for a little LAN webpage or whatnot.

I was told once the "best" minimalist distro was debian.  I sure like
the
> functionality of apt-get.

A little off-topic, but if you like debian's apt-get, you'll also enjoy
gentoo's <http://gentoo.org> emerge utility.  This is off topic, because
gentoo compiles all applications upon installation with emerge, which is
quite uneconomical with a flash card system, due to lack of resources. 
But gentoo is my recent favorite distro, because you have complete
control over what's going on, and you can optimize every application's
compile for your system.  It's not for the feint of heart though,
because the installation is completely manual, but it does have
step-by-step documentation, which is really useful in learning about how
Linux works, at least it has been for me.

-Kekoa