[sdiy] bootable linux cd

[ASSI]

On Sunday 27 July 2003 18:16, Michael Zacherl wrote:
> Linux has been mentioned - there are several more or less complex
> projects out there which specialise to run on a rather small (32MB or
> so) CF card.

The uCLinux boot image for the senTec COBRA Coldfire SBC (available via 
http://www.elektronikladen.de ) is about 1MB. Decompressed it occupies 
from about 4MB in RAM, depending on which things you have it configured 
to do and how large you made the RAMdisk that it expands into.

Most CF cards can be directly plugged (via an adapter) to an IDE bus 
and function quite well as a boot device. Only if you want to write to 
the card you should get a Solid State Disk, as their controller will 
take care to evenly spread the writes over the complete memory.

Most PC motherboards can boot from USB memory sticks nowadays. There 
are two ways to format these that are mutually exclusive (SuperFloppy 
and HD) and some BIOSes will recognize only one for booting. Some 
sticks can switch between two independent memories that you could then 
format differently if you insist on having a single device for all 

> Modern OS rely on being able to write data back on a media and (at
> least for the sake of minimum comfort) find them when booting up
> again. So putting up a modern multi user and furthermore multitasking
> OS would require a lot more effort.

No, *NIX systems run perfectly well just in RAM and boot happily from 
non-writable medium. This is by design as you really don't want to have 
the files writable on any security critical system. There are many more 
embedded and embedded real-time OS out there that have even smaller 
footprints, but you need to pay money to use them.


Achim.
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