Just starting out

tdb30_ · 08-13-2005, 11:51 PM

I plan on booting directly from a 4GB USB flash drive. I've been looking at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ for my distribution. Does anyone have experience with it? I will probably have to register on their forums for a lot of the "how do I do that" questions but I'm wondering if there is anyone here whos brain I can pick that has done a similar install.

My main goal is to have no moving parts, but I'm finding that flash is basicly a finite resource as it wears out over time. I'm starting to think laptop hard drive but I realy don't know how well it will hold up in the heat of summer and the cold of winter in chicago. Plus my car isn't the softest ride in the world so I'm worried the bumps would wreck the drive sooner rather than later.

So I guess my point is "has anyone used dsl for a distribution that can help me get started". Or is there a better debian install for flash devices (I don't likke rpms and gentoo seems pretty formidable to get used to and work with).

tom61 · 08-14-2005, 04:04 PM

Flash is OK to use, except it'd wear out alot sooner (don't have any hard data, off hand) if you use a swap partition on it. Most stuff is rarely written to, with the notable exception of swap, so if you have enough RAM for the apps you need to run, just don't use a swap partition and you should be set for years of running.

What are you intending to do on it, and how much RAM do you have?

tdb30_ · 08-14-2005, 07:31 PM

I will be installing 512MB of ram. I don't plan on a swap file. I heard you can mount a drive with noatime as a parameter to avoid it writing to the flash every time a file is accessed. DSL from what I hear runs totaly in a ramdisk so that should help extend the life.

However, I'm new to DSL and I'm having issues on how I would add new software to the distribution.

Do you think I should go with a straight install instead of having it run in ramdisk? Do you think the noatime option as well as not having a swap file will be sufficient for 5 to 10 years of life in the stick?

TheLlama · 09-21-2005, 11:26 PM

Still, Flash Drives only support something in the order of 100,000 rewrite cycles.