CF to IDE Adapter

Forum: Laptops
Topic: CF to IDE Adapter
started by: caulktel

Posted by caulktel on Aug. 13 2004,19:45

Hi,
I was wanting some help on deciding how to setup DSL on a 256 meg SanDisk Compact Flash chip that I will be installing on one of John's CF to IDE adapters for a laptop. I want to use the frugal install script (so as not to thrash the CF chip), but am not sure what the best way to do this is. I noticed that John is selling them preinstalled on CF. He is partitioning them into two partitions, the first having the frugal install, and the second one having the mydsl stuff on it. How big should the first partition be? And if I put all my programs like Firefox in the second partition, how do I setup DSL so that it always looks there for any programs before installing to CF, so it won't keep asking where they are. I primarily will be using this to surf the web and check email, and to stream audio with XMMS. The other questian I had was, being that DSL will be loaded into memory at every bootup, is 96 meg of ram going to be enough to run it. I am presently running DSL on it now with a hard drive, but am hoping to pick up some performance gain, and have a noisless machine by running from CF. It is a old Hitachi Pentium 133 MMX w/96meg ram. There is also a modprobe command that I have to place in the /opt/bootlocal.sh so that my sound card will work, so that would also need to be done before installing to CF. Any advice would be apreciated.

DSL Rocks!

Joel
KB6QVI

Posted by roberts on Aug. 13 2004,22:24

The frugal_instal.sh script prompts you for a backup/restore partition as well as a myDSL partition which can be the same. The min size for the base DSL should be at least 54MB. So I would partition with two partitions.

When you first boot up from CF, then setup your sound, add the /opt/bootlocal module line and save it using the filetool system.

Concerning your 96MB of memory, are you currently running a swap on the hard drive? If you are removing the hard drive and then going without swap, may be a big performance hit or show stopper on large apps. You may want to test first by removing the swap on the hard drive and check the performance. Do not setup swap on the CF. It will ruin the CF very quickly.

I run only the base DSL on a 32MB laptop with only a CF card and no swap and it is OK using only one base app at a time. I have setup another laptop with 196MB and only a CF no swap and can run several extensions.

I specifically added the options to frugal for such CF systems. I run 4 CF systems and all is well.

Posted by caulktel on Aug. 13 2004,23:42

Hi Robert,

Thanks, that is the info I needed. Yes I am aware of the swap issue on CF, but don't see that as a problem now knowing that the base OS only needs 54 meg, as that will leave me plenty for all the apps I will be running. I'm so used to running older hardware that I almost never run more that one app at a time anyway. I might leave Sylpheed running while doing something else, but will just have to experiment a little to see what I can get away with. Thanks again for the info.

Joel

Posted by caulktel on Aug. 14 2004,15:44

Hey Robert,

I repartitioned my CF card with a 64 meg for the OS and the rest for mydsl and restore, so far so good. Then I did frugal install and specified hda2 as the restore and mydsl partition. Now I'm testing this on a differant system as I don't have the CF to IDE adapter yet for the laptop, but I do have one for regular IDE cables. When I try to open anything very big, such as XMMS, the window opens breifly then shuts down. I believe that there is not enough ram left to run any apps (acctully there is only 2 meg left). This system has only 80 meg of ram. Now should I have not picked the option to "toram"? You said that you were using it on a 32 meg laptop. The more I think about it, I answered my own question. I will reinstall without the toram option.

Joel

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 15 2004,03:26

Yeah, you should definately not use the "toram" option if you only have 96MB of RAM and no hard drive swap partition because you won't have much free RAM leftover after bootup and any large app could crash itself or even crash the entire system when you launch the app.

The CF card should be pretty fast so although DSL will be a little slower than a "toram" install it should still be quite usable and faster than a liveCD bootup.

Posted by roberts on Aug. 15 2004,05:31

Sorry, Joel. I should have mentioned that. I never use toram with compact flash. The compact flash with ide is very nice. I find it much better than the USB pendrive. Except compact flash is not portable like the pendrive. I am sure you will enjoy the speed of compact flash on IDE.