Zonbu Affordable Linux Machine

[upstatemike]

I have a nice ARM board running Debian (32M of Ram and a 2Gig Flash card - no swap is being used). I had an old 333Mhz machine with 16M of Ram and 2 NICs as my router for a long while. I had it setup for floppy boot, then net boot and finally CF (32M). It worked great but switched over to the Linksys to lower power usage. Swap is not a must with Linux but you have to be careful not to load a program that want too much memory.

Can't I get solid state memory that won't wear out? Are thumb drives flash memory? I could just load a USB hub up with thumb drives...?

 

[linuxha]

I have a nice ARM board running Debian (32M of Ram and a 2Gig Flash card - no swap is being used). I had an old 333Mhz machine with 16M of Ram and 2 NICs as my router for a long while. I had it setup for floppy boot, then net boot and finally CF (32M). It worked great but switched over to the Linksys to lower power usage. Swap is not a must with Linux but you have to be careful not to load a program that want too much memory.

Can't I get solid state memory that won't wear out? Are thumb drives flash memory? I could just load a USB hub up with thumb drives...?

Down boy, one question at a time!

Can't I get solid state memory that won't wear out?

I believe that you can get those drives though they are expensive at this time. That would work well for the R/W portion of the drive and swap. Just remember that sometimes you just don't need that much memory. My Linksys has 16M of RAM and 2.8M of flash. As it's currently running it has 1M of ram free.

Are thumb drives flash memory?

Yes, thumb drives use Flash memory also.

I could just load a USB hub up with thumb drives...?

Sure Linux just treats them as SCSI drives (any USB drive is treated as a SCSI drive). I have had 3 drives on my NSLU using a hub. I used the third to save/recover information from one drive to the network share. The NSLU has swap because I tend to run a few too many things on that from time to time.

I hope to be working on a few othe boards for Linux projects and I think I can get away without using swap but I need the 'drive' storage so I can run things that don't stay in memory.

Just one more thing to note, some boards (older PC especially) don't know how to boot from USB. You may need to fiddle with the boot loader or boot from one loader to another to get it to load one thing to then boot the Linux kernel with USB support.