TecSpy.com Michael Erskine's Domain

I'm writing this entry from a completely solid-state machine thanks to Alistair for donating a 32Mb compact flash card for me to play with. Actually it isn't properly finished yet and I still rely on Knoppix for a good web browsing experience! The machine is a Via EPIA 5000 Mini-ITX board that has been propping up my monitor for the past few years. My wife has been using this machine to boot into Windows 2000 on those occasions I'm not there to demonstrate the free alternatives available on our family Linux box but I've decided it should be put to better use as a media streaming device since it is completely silent with a 12V DC 75W ATX power supply and in a stylish G-Alantic case with front-munted USB ports and a little IR window. I've set up a CF to IDE adapter that I bought some years ago for $20 with the 32Mb CF and after attaching a temporary CD drive and booting an old Knoppix CD I was able to use cfdisk and mke2fs to create a single ext2 partition. This partition will be mounted read-only by the way since we don't want to unduely hammer the flash and I haven't got to grips with JFFS2 yet! The read-write parts of the system will be in ramfs: /var, /home, /tmp and some others using up a small part of the 512Mb of RAM available. Using grub-install I was able to make the partition bootable. I'm going to use a kernel and modified initrd from a Movix2 iso - http://movix.sourceforge.net/ - once it is downloaded! Updates soon.