[aprssig] itty bitty laptop

[Curt, WE7U]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2007, Bill Vodall WA7NWP wrote:

> Nothing starts the day like a chance to disagree with my buddy Curt..

Is that like the "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" quote
from "Apocalypse Now?


> Technically correct and the suggestion of putting temp files in RAM is
> a good thing but...   That limited number (of writes) is in the
> hundreds of thousands and is generally automatically spread across the
> device to equalize the ware.  Even folks like Curt and I that like to
> squeeze the last bit of use out of legacy equipment

Read that as "cheap b*stards".


> are far more
> likely to replace the flash devices as being too small and obsolete
> before there starts to be a problem with burned out cells.

Hmmm.  I still say that if you have swap on you flash drive and/or
daemons writing to the filesystem regularly, that you may end up
with dead flash sooner than you'd like.  I can see your point though
if you have a flash filesystem that is "walking" the writes around
the device:  It'd take a whole heck of a lot longer to destroy it.

This reminded me of something I had to do on one Linux device.  This
one had a small C: flash drive with DOS on it built into the
motherboard, but that drive could be changed to the D: drive via the
CMOS BIOS settings.  I did that, put in a real hard drive in the
first slot, but couldn't get Linux to boot.  Turns out the Linux
kernel has a check for flash devices and if it finds them on
_either_ of the first two drives, it stops booting at that stage.  A
quick tweak to the kernel sources and I was up and running.  Those
trying to put Linux on a flash filesystem may still need to do this.


> I picked up a close out USB2 and Firewire PCI card at Radio Shack
> yesterday that has an extra USB2 internal slot.

A closeout that wasn't posted to one of our lists?  Wah!  I need
something to go with my 6 DigiTravelers and my 3 mobile adjustable
power supplies (also closeouts) that I use very few of.


> I'll be interesting to see if Linux is some how smart enough to give
> priority to the Flash for swap instead of using the existing swap on
> the hard drive.

If I remember correctly if round-robins the available swap devices.

BTW Bill:  I followed the Comcast cable along the poles on my
commute home last night.  It runs all the way to the pole sitting in
front of my house, so three sides of my property have high-speed
internet zipping by them now.  Just not to my house yet.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"