Was a newbie, now a polliwog

[Richard Smith]

Thomas Fritz wrote:

> What I want to do with one of the thin clients is put on linuxbios, and 
> since I would be using the PCMCIA for USB, boot a compact system off of 
> a USB memory stick.

The PCMCIA is a problem.  PCMCIA cardservices is a big beast.  Linuxbios 
dosen't currently do PCMCIA.

I created a setup with one of our boards that net booted via a PCMCIA 
wireless card.  To make that happen I had to boot a linux kernel and 
then kexec into my netbooted image.

At that time kernel cardservices would not do our wifi card and I had to 
use pcmcia-cs.  Compiling a only the necessary programs from pcmcia-cs 
against uclibc I was able to get a kernel+initrd down to just less than 
a meg.  Our board has 2 29F040b's on it (designed with this in mind) so 
I got it all on board.  Took work though.

If you use 2.6.x and the set of tiny patches that allows you rips out 
most of the features that make it large you _might_ get down to less 
512k  Probally going to be tight though.

This route has be talked about but I don't think anyone has ever seen 
how small you can get 2.6.x with the tiny1 patches.

Eric B. mentioned that he was going to play with this someday but I 
don't know if he ever did.

Here's the link for the tiny1 tree.  Give it a whirl and report back 
what you find.  Using Linux as the bootloader is the holy grail of 
linuxbios booting.

http://www.selenic.com/tiny-about/