Fedora on Compact Flash
 

My goal is to run Linux on a single board computer. The particular device has 128M of RAM, VGA, IDE interface, keyboard and mouse, integrated networking and a compact flash slot. Currently I have a 256 Meg CF installed but could go as high as 1G. The machine also has a PCMCIA slot with a linksys WPC11 wireless B adapter.

I would like the system to be able to support some very basic networking daemons via wireless namely telnet or ssh , any ftp variant and hopefully httpd in the future. I know there are various embedded distros that can provide this function but I would like to have one based on Fedora. My motivation is ( at least in my mind ) flexibility and robustness.
Also, it seems that many embedded systems rely on a initrd for their file system. With only 128M of RAM I feel this may be too restrictive for my apps.

So far I have been able to cobble together a system which boots and allows logins at run level 3. This was accomplished by building a filesystem in a small partition on my host machine, transferring it to a CF mounted in a reader on the host, playing a few games with GRUB and making the CF bootable. So far so good but I feel I have a long way to go to my goal. So here are my questions. Should I :

1)Continue down this path of slow discovery, building a homegrown filesystem.
2)Attach a CDROM drive to the target and let Fedora scope out the hardware and configure it.

I think option 2 would be the easiest but my concern is wear and tear on the CF. Specifically, how does one deal with /var? I would imagine that syslogd and friends would impose numerous write cycles limiting its lifespan. Should I worry about this ? Does disk caching mitigate the problem ? If not, what are my options? I would like some level of logging for debug purposes of course. Is there any way of defining a ramdisk and mounting /var there? I realize this is hazardous and volatile but may be enough for my purposes.

Thanks in advance to all.

I have the same point.

I'd a diskless pc by the time PC able to read CF on boot.
I put only winmill(DOS) on the CF. It's been 5 years and there's no impact on the CF.

Soon I will try DAMNSMALL linux, said it's compatible with the CF.?
Posibly 4 megs MICRODRIVE are available on market now.
Logically there won't be nag on installing LINUX.

Regards

Some progress but more questions.
 

After having been away for a while I am back to working this project.

I reconfigured the kernel to to circumvent 2 issues.

1) I removed ACPI and APM support
2) I removed DMA support for the harddrive

Item 2 significantly reduced the kernel boot time. Since I don't intend to access the CF much after I'm up and running, I do not think there will be much of a performance impact.

My biggest headache now is starting init. I now get the message :

Kernel Panic - not syncing : Attempted to kill init

I read several posts which suggest that this may be a problem with the filesystem. I don't believe this is so in my case. As an experiment I built a test program. Basically a "Hello World" and copied it as /sbin/init. The kernel found this and executed it just fine.

I started to think this may be an issue with dynamic linked libraries. I mounted the CF in my host machine and performed a:

ldconfig -r /media/disk

This built a new ld.so.cache in /etc but the problem persists. So... I have 2 questions.

1) Any clue what may be going on ???
2) I can hack the init daemon to continue debug but am having trouble locating the source code. Any pointers ?

Thanks..