Anybody tried running Puppy from flash on Epia 600?

[marmaduke]

Just about to play with a silent PC based around a EPIA 600 motherboard,
but I have been using chubby puppy for about 3 weeks and am so hooked.


so now I want to try either compact flash IDE or USB booting of motherboard with puppy.

Just wondered if anyone else has done this or wants to share their wisdom before I start.

cheers

[flavour]

I do exactly this - works fine
I couldn't get the BIOS to boot from my USB stick, so am using an IDE-CF adapter
Mine is formatted in ext3 & the initial grub was done by installing Debian base...however I'm sure it would work just as well with VFAT & using the Puppy grub installer...

I have just 256Mb RAM & yet it runs quite reasonably...even chubby

F

[marmaduke]

Great, sounds like it should all work fine. Should be buying bits this week sometime. Any trouble with CF ie manufacturer or speed ? Dont mind spending a bit more to get a CF that is sure to work.

Never thought about formating the CF first, oops! good idea.

Hope to boot from CD then do HD install from puppy.

Plan is to run this in a custom built case able to run from 12v.

Thanks for the reply

Cheers

[flavour]

12V is my aim too.
I installed from CD - used a std CD-ROM drive so needed to use a power cable from another case! Lucky this bastard was only up for a short time
I use SANDisk CF since a colleague has had problems with any other brand...this is my only personal experience so I couldn't be sure about any other brands...

F

[danleff]

I have an IDE CF disk adapter on my VIA-EPIA M10000, which is read just like a hard drive. I keep wanting to try Puppy on a 1 gig CF card, but my camera takes priority!

I'll have to try it out this week.

Good luck!

[dvw86]

If you install it to a CF card, be sure to put the CF card in a USB adaptor and use the "instal to USB" script. Then remove the card and put it in the CF to IDE adaptor. If you use the "instal to hard drive" script it will write the the CF card much more often and greatly reduce the life of the card. See here for more information.
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=1360&highlight=

[gnomen]

I've had two issues with my flash-puppy

1) The motherboard came with a preinstalled RedHat thing, Grub and ext3 on a pretty slow 256MB CF-card. After I formated to FAT and ran the install-to-usb script Puppy wouldn't boot off the card. I suspect something was not quite right with syslinux or the MBR, maybe due to the deleted Grub. I fiddled for a month and got it working, but I have no idea what did it

2) Slow CF-cards don't need a "ide=nodma" statement in the syslinux.cfg, while fast CF-cards do need such a statement on my motherboard. That gave me a week of headaches..

[keenerd]

Other things to remember:

Be careful with the swap space. Hopefully you have enough RAM that you won't need it. If you do need it, tweak the boot process so that it doesn't create a RAM disk. Otherwise the RAM disk will load into swap and do just as much damage as running a regular hard drive install.

Can't help you with what to do to not create the RAM disk, I'm still experimenting myself.

[marmaduke]

Sorry about the delay but been working away.

Well thanks for all the input. Things put back a week or so as my main PC blew up and has had to be repaired.

Never mind I'll get back on the trail shoetly.
Thanks for all the help. I'll post again when I get some parts

Cheers