[Coco] 2gig CF card killed

[Roger Taylor]

At 04:35 PM 3/22/2008, you wrote:
>You can try Puppylinux. It's designed to run from a CF card.
>http://puppylinux.com/
>I don't remember for sure which wi-fi drivers come with ti, but 
>there are plenty.


The OS itself is ok I guess, nothing like a Fedora 8 or 9 build :), 
but I was impressed on the first run of the live CD to see the zd1211 
support so my Belkin wireless G USB adaptor would work.  After about 
30 minutes of exploring the menus and wondering how they got all that 
in 50mb?, I finally found the network utility and figured out that 
eth1 was my USB dongle.  Bam - it saw my wireless router after a few tests.

Now, the whole idea was to put this on a 2 gig CF card for my little 
IA-1 unit to boot from.  So I found the Universal Install option in 
one of the menus, which gladly installs to any kind of storage device 
that might be present.  With the CF card inserted in my laptop 
running PuppyLinux, I installed the os to the card.  That was a 
painful experiment becasue of all of the warnings and dialogs that 
show up before and after every single option you choose, which can 
confuse all the nonexperts.  Anyway somehow the CF got formatted as a 
"superfloppy" but with some kind of internal ext3 or ext2? partition, 
bla bla but syslinux would make it all bootable for the stubborn 
computers.  I then moved the card over to the IA-1 unit, turned it 
on, and PuppyLinux booted (slowly).  I yelled YEEHOOW! (really).

However, something is wrong, or went wrong, because the system won't 
run completely.  Maybe it's the DNA mode needing to be disabled (as 
Puppy suggests at the boot prompt).  It slows down to far slower than 
a snail's speed when it's trying to set up the video driver and so 
forth, and the cursor vanishes all the time (if it moves at all), and 
the background and icons never appears for the desktop.  It took all 
night and part of today before the menu strip appeared.  I just left 
it running to see what would happen.  Now clicking on something does 
nothing until about 2 minutes later, then the cursor hangs for 
another 5 minutes or more, etc.  So, it's crap until I can get it 
working.  Now the CD itself won't boot up any faster than a snail on 
the same laptop.  So both the CF and the CD are basically useless.  I 
do have the original .iso though.  Did Puppy write stuff back to the 
live CD-R ?

If Midori would just have the zd1211 driver built-in or at least in a 
folder where I can modprobe it or whatever i have to do to load the 
driver and get it running for my wireless network adaptor, then I 
could update the system more over time.  Midori is very bare, with 
hardly anything in the menus at all, but at least the base system 
runs out of the box on the IA-1, and FAST, which is why I am hoping 
to get the zd1211rw driver installed there to get my network support.





I know this isn't CoCo conversation so I'll wrap it up before I get 
in trouble, but I do want to do CoCo development, like testing CCASM 
on various Linux builds, etc. so any help would be appreciated.  So, 
does anyone know of a small Linux build that will run in 32mb of RAM, 
and possibly use either the internal 16mb flash memory or part of the 
2gig CF card for swap?  The IA-1 has 32mb of RAM, 16mb internal flash 
(which Midori is installed on now, but with no zd1211 driver).