[Coco] 2gig CF card killed

[Roger Taylor]

At 10:24 AM 3/22/2008, you wrote:

>The main reason to use CF in place of a hard drive is for embedded
>systems, network appliances, or some other use where you want mass
>storage that needs to be small, energy efficient, and/or resistant to
>vibration.  Something like the aforementioned Linux distros will run
>without swap, given enough RAM, or will make swap an option that the
>user can switch on when necessary.  These OSes also use all sorts of
>cool filesystem tricks so they can overlay changes to what would
>ordinarily be a read-only medium on a RAMdisk, and then save the changes
>to writable non-volatile storage on shutdown.


Here's my situation: My Compaq IA-1 has Midori Linux installed in the 
16mb internal memory.  MSN Companion was erased in the process.  So, 
when no CF card is plugged in, the IA-1 boots into Linux.  If a 
bootable CF card is inserted, the IA tries to boot it.

Do you think Fedora 8 would install to a 2gig CF?  I could trim a lot 
of the fat from the DVD install, no problem.  What I want to do is 
run Fedora on the IA-1 since Fedora 8 has the zd1211 driver built in 
and I can use my Belkin USB Wireless G adaptor to access the network 
and web.  I'd like to tell Fedora at some point to use the IA-1's 
internal 16mb for the swap, which means this will have to be done 
after the CF card is moved over to the IA-1 after Fedora was 
installed to it from another PC, but this is from a semi-newbie view.

If Fedora is too resource hungy, what other small build that can use 
16mb of memory is there that has the zd1211 driver already 
there?  Midori may even have it but I wouldn't know because no 
commands at all work from the command prompt box they put in 
there.  Even "dir" doesn't work.  Only "cd" works as far as I have 
had time to notice.

I just want my IA-1 system to run at least one kind of CoCo 3 
emulator AND browse the web using the Belkin USB wireless adaptor 
like how I do from Fedora on another PC.  The IA-1 already can run 
the CoCo emulators if the CF card is formatted to have MS-DOS on it, 
but I want to move beyond that now.

Windows 98SE is looking like it's going to lock up every time I get a 
good ways into the install on the IA-1 when it's checking for Plug 
and Play devices.  It can sit there for a whole day and never break 
the loop.  It looks like Linux is my best bet.