Wow, this might actually work for the cf card....

What? LNX-BBC? Yes I think it might. I recently stuck it on a USB hard drive (actually an Archos JB MP3 Player), but since my computer's BIOS would not boot to a USB drive I still had to use a boot floppy with it. I also put a copy on a Zip disk, but had to do a custom kernel to make it boot.

One problem with LNX-BBC is the same problem Jailbait has. To squeeze everything in a little space, it uses a compressed read-only file system. This really complicates making changes because you have to copy the whole file system out to a normal, non compressed Linux file system somewhere, make your change, then re-compress it and copy it back. What a PAIN! Jailbait at least had some directories on read-write file systems, Since LNX-BBC is meant to run entirely on a CDROM, it is 100% Read only except for a Ramdisk that goes away with each reboot. Yes, you can change a lot of this, but its hard.

The mini distro's that don't use a compressed read only file system are a lot easier to deal with if you got the storage space.

Vector Linux (core part only) used to fit in a 245 MB space, but now it just misses, I got one to fit by simply deleting some stuff I didn't want out of it. It is based on Slackware, which is my current favorite distro, but package management kind of sucks.

Debian "Woody" will build a minimum (and boring) system in about 100 Megs, but with no funny business. Then their "APT-GET" utility works great for adding & deleting packages you want while keeping your system stable. Software updates with Debian are just as easy once you learn to deal with the three separate distribution trees (the "unstable" branch is said to not be all that unstable lot of people use it, the "stable" branch is typically way out of date, but currently it isn't too bad). In the long run I think you would be happier with Debian, in the short run, it's tedious to learn how to get every thing working correctly.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you are saying here. It sounds like you want to create a bootable CD image of how you want your IA-1 to work, then clone it to your CF card.

You can do this. There are some issues, but I won't discuss them yet other than to say I think they can be dealt with. We can proceed if you decide this is what is going to work the best for you. Tell me what you have in mind.

So it sounds like you have another computer besides the IA-1 that has a CDR, and a CF card reader, maybe a decent hard drive with a real full sized OS on it? I was worried that you were trying to perform all this development on the IA-1 with DOS or Windows CE! ... a bit of a challenge.

NAY! Never! I've got a Laptop with a CD-RW, and a 40 gig. CF reader is pcmcia, rather than usb. I ACTUALLY meant to clone the CF onto the CD, not the other way around. However, which would be easier?

Now I'm really confused. Why would you clone it to a CD? for archival purposes? (which would be a good Idea). Which image are your trying to to clone, the your original one, or the Linux+DOS one that your are proposing?

I guess maybe so you can run Linux on your laptop instead of the IA-1. Yea you could, but if you are going to do that I would go with a full blown Linux-on-a-CD distro like "Virtual Linux (http://www.virtual-linux.org/index.html)" or "Knoppix" (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html). These are about as close you can get to a real Linux installation without touching a hard drive. This might be the best idea yet. It will give you a nice introduction to Linux instead of the grueling "in-the-trenches" view you'll get with these mini distro's

Ouch, you've got ME confused. Yeah, I'd make the cd for archival purposes. So that if something happens to the cf card, it's as easy as a drive copy to recreate it. The linux+dos image. I AM running linux on my laptop for now. Mandrake 9.0.
Then using my LAPTOP to create the cf for the IA-1.

Oh good!

You've got a good setup to play with all this stuff then.

It sounds like you're good to go to test out some of the stuff we've been talking about. We've layed out lots of options, and there are more as well (Pee-Wee Linux might be another one). With Linux is kind of seems like there is a way to do just about anything once you figure out how.