HD Install :: Best way of installing to CF

Hi

Please excuse my ignorance if these questions seem basic, but I'm new to Linux and DSL, and having trouble putting all the info together.

I have put together a mini-ITX machine with a CD-ROM, 256 Mb RAM, and a 128Mb compactflash on an IDE converter - no hard disk. Apart from the CD, this machine is dead silent as it has no fans at all. Booting from the CD works well, as does performing a frugal install to the CF card and booting from that.

The problem is that I have just heard that CF cards only stand a limited number of writes, so I'm a little concerned about the caching, and backups etc. When I re-ran the frugal install I specified "toram" as the only boot option to speed things up a little, and thought that this would prevent writes to the CF. However, when I change the Firefox homepage etc and make a few other modifications, these changes are remembered the next time I boot - so it must still be writing to the CF.

Could someone recommend the best way of performing a frugal install, please? I would like to make a few modifications the first time I run it from the CF (such as setting up Sylpheed, homepage, and installing a couple of MyDSL extensions), but after that, I would like it completely read only.

Many thanks

From what I understand on a compact flash card you would not want to use a persistent /home or /opt directories and you would not want to use a swap as these would all cause high wear on your device. I believe you could set up hda1 for your filesystem and hda2 for mydsl and backup/restore. That way it would look for and load your extension files at boot and backup everything when you shutdown, but would not be writing to the device all the time. I have not done this myself so please correct me if I am wrong.

...adssse catches on to this DSL stuff quickly... nice..

Continue to use the "toram" option, as this will improve
performance, and reduce CF disk access..
( writes will write to the ramspace, not the CF. )

If you feel an application(s) would eat up a large portion
of your ram, only then would I run it without the "toram" option..

Remember, with no swap partition or swapfile,
once you run out of inodes, ram, etc.. your hosed..

If in doubt, run a manual backup prior to exploring
the limits, or running unfamiliar or multiple applications.

73
ke4nt

Thanks for the help ke4nt1, forgot to talk about toram.
I have been thinking about trying frugal on cf, but was wondering if it would be a better setup than my hd. I dont have much ram in my old system so I am using a swap partition on the hd and it concerns me that I would not be able to do this with cf. That along with the fact that I would still have to purchase the adapter and cf card have made me hesitent to try it. Are cf setups better suited towards pc's with larger amounts of ram?

I actually have another question in addition to the ones above. I am not sure which cf adapter I would need for my desktop either. I believe that I would need a 40 pin, but there are two different ones.

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