Looking to put slack on a CF card... so how would I make slack read only?

I have just finished (well, it is never going to be finished) a version of Slackware for CF cards, so I can give you some advice on this one.

If you are planning on installing Slackware on the CF like it was a harddrive, and then mounting it as root (hda1) forget it. Even though it could be done this way, it would be very slow. Also, the space on the CF card could be used much more efficiently.

For my system I boot into RAM, using the CF card to hold only the image of the Linux system (and kernel). This has two advantages, first, using a RAMDISK as your root mount point is going to be very fast, and two, you can compress your system image and get 3x the amount of data on the CF card.

For instance, I am using a 32 MB CF card which boots up my 28 MB Slackware system. But, only 12 MB are actually used on the CF card.

I have run my ZipSlack-based Amigo Linux on a USB 1.1 FLASH drive just fine.
However, it's going to fry your card pretty quickly. The cards have a limited number of read-writes. Still, it's easy to make it work for emergencies. Turn off all logging. the best way is to not install the syslog package. And don't use a swap file on the FLASH card.
There is a way to make the cards last much longer by using JFFS2 file system. Search Google, or even better search vivisimo.com.

Like I said... Read Only.

Ok... well I will put it like this...

I want the computer to use the CF card as if it was a bootable CD. The card is in read only mode just like a CD can't be written to...

So MS3FGX...
How do you make a bootable image for a CF card?

Just use dd to make a blank image the size you need, format it like you would format a drive, then mount it and copy your Linux system to it. Compress it with gzip, and you are done.

I use SYSLINUX to boot the card. It is designed to boot Linux from a FAT device (like the CF card) and it supports booting system images like I just described. You could format the CF card with ext2 and put LILO on it, but I found this more trouble than it was worth.