[luau] Demo Linux PC

MonMotha monmotha at indy.rr.com
Wed Jun 25 12:16:01 PDT 2003


Vince Hoang wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2003 at 04:45:59PM -0500, MonMotha wrote:
> 
>>The biggest problem you'll have is getting some of your
>>favorite software in. 256MB is pretty generous for this, but
>>GNOME/KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. are all VERY large. If
>>you're willing to stick to things like Phoenix/Firebird, and
>>apps that don't need GNOME, but only GTK, you should be able to
>>make it fit with room to spare.
> 
> 
> But Wayne was asking to "squeeze a modified, but almost
> full-featured, RH distro into a 256 MB flash disk".
> 
> If the size issue could be conquered, how long could the setup be
> used before the CF card is rendered unusable?

Most of the time, the flash used in CF cards is good for 100,000 erase cycles. 
They also usually do wear patterning (attempting to evenly use the flash).  Once 
a sector hits 100k erases, it marks it bad and remaps the sector (much like IDE 
hard drives).  The figure I saw for a measly 2MB flash chip was that if you 
erased it 10 times a day completely it would last 12 years.

Someone calculated that for the 32MB ipaqs, erasing it and writing to it AS FAST 
AS POSSIBLE woudl result in hitting the limit in somewhere around 8 years.

Basically, you don't have to worry about hitting the flash erase limits any time 
soon.  If it's really a concern, I know people make NOR flash chips that are 
rated for 1,000,000 erase cycles.  It may be possible tog et a CF card yusing 
that, though the chips tend to only be smaller ones.

Regarding fitting a full featured distro in 256MB.  I see no reason it wouldn't 
be possible, just that redhat packages tend to have every bell an whistle turned 
on resulting in a bunch of dependencies you never use.  Also, every package 
contains a bunch of documetnation and other stuff you'll probably not need in a 
situation like this (not that including documentation isn't NORMALLY a good thing).

Take a look at the familar project for ipaqs.  We manage to cram busybox, GTK+, 
an X server, a bunch of libs and fonts, a kernel, a PDA PIM suite, and a bunch 
of extras into about 12MB.  If you're willing to give up GNOME/KDE it should be 
quite doable.  Unfortunately including all the "stuff" that makes up your 
average GNOME or KDE desktop (like Nautilus or Konquerer) tends to take up a lot 
of space, not for the apps, but for all the supporting libs.  On a desktop 
system these libraries may take up 100MB or so, but the size of the libs 
diminishes as the number of apps that use them goes up (as they're shared).  In 
situations where only one app will be using a lib, the library alone can seem 
quite big (a common one here is libcrypto, which I have on my firewall card just 
so that I can run OpenSSH; for this reason I'm looking for SSH replacements that 
don't need libcrypto which is about 900k).

Making small linux systems, even with a lot of "stuff" can be done; you just 
have to creatively omit things (do you really NEED nautilus on a system where 
all you need is a web browser?  If you can give up the whole GNOME environment 
you can probably save yourself about 100MB!).

--MonMotha




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