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Help me pick a good distro for an unusual platform, plz...

L

laserhawk64

Member
Hi ya'll... I'm a linux n00b... I know a bit of the terminology, and I've dabbled in Ubuntu (and Xubuntu on one box of mine...) but when it gets to looking at other stuff, I'm not so sure of what I'm doing 😳

So... a little explanation of what I'm doing first, then relevant machine specs...

Someone on [H]ard|Forum has some thin clients, they're little, they're junky... they'd make an awesome very-low-spec PCs if one could get through the kinks of making 'em work. Each box comes with a VIA Eden of unknown speed (probably no less than 600MHz, but most certainly not more than 1GHz), 64MB of PC133 SDRAM, and a special widget attached to the IDE port. It's called a DiskOnChip, and it's commonly used in these sorts of applications. It's sorta like a USB flash drive, only it's IDE instead of USB. This particular one is 16MB.

Now here's the doozy. The power supply on this thing is rated for 22.5W. I'm not kidding -- 5V @ 4.5A, you can check my math if you want. It's a two-pin connector to the mainboard (+V and GND) so no ACPI here. For all intents and purposes, we're dealing with an AT box, unless there's something about it that I don't know yet.

Specs next. Keep in mind that, with a PSU that weak, I can't just chuck an HDD in this thing... even the 2.5" notebook drives usually use ~2W for their read-write ops, and I'm not entirely sure that I have that much power to spare.

Once I get done tinkering, the specs will be...
- Same CPU (VIA Eden, ~600MHz+)
- 256MB PC133 SDRAM
- and a CF Card + CF->IDE adapter. The card will be at least 8GB.

Seems to me that a flash memory based distro (or three or four or twenty-five) has to be around by now... but DistroWatch won't let me filter by that. I will say that I've used DSL and DSL-N very briefly, and I can't stand 'em. They look rather unrefined, and are extremely unintuitive to use -- no OS should require 15min of searching for the applications menu, only to realize that it's part of the "context" (AKA right-click) menu. I will also mention that I seem to have a fondness for *.deb packages.

Now that I'm done with my lecture, let me ask you: what distro should I use?

EDIT: forgot to mention... right now I'm looking at WattOS, but I'm waiting to find out compatibility w/ flash devices from them. When I find out, I'll post here.
 
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Try Puppy. It's light, but has a nice feature set, and isn't as spartan as DSL. You shouldn't need a special "flash" install distro. AFAIK, they'll all install, and the media is irrelevant.
 
I'm not sure puppy would run on something this crappy 😉

BTW, you do need a special flash install -- here's why (this much I understand pretty well).

On a regular (mechanical) HDD, you can (theoretically) read-write until infinity happens. There is no inherent maximum number of read- or write-cycles until the drive is rendered useless from wear. This is because it's magnetic. As the platters spin around, the heads can easily swap polarity on a given very small portion of the platter (write) or detect the polarity of same (read). This does not affect the platters' capability to be read from or written to at all.

But you cannot say the same is true of solid-state memory. *ALL* flash-based memory (to my knowledge) has a maximum number of read/write cycles before it's dead and gone. On most flash ICs, that number is at least 10,000 cycles... and the good stuff can handle at least 100,000.

But the problem is still there, and therefore, the number of read/write cycles needs to be minimized on any application involving flash memory. You can't eliminate the problem, but you can make it less bad.

(BTW, sorry to bring an apple into the orange thread, but one of the reasons that WinXP won't install to an SSD without major trickery is that it's software-incompatible with the stuff... another reason to avoid OS's not designed for operating on flash memory.)

That's why I need an OS designed /specifically/ for operating off of flash media...

EDIT: Looks like Puppy *might* work... I'm perusing their forums, trying to figure it out for sure...

EDIT2: Wow, they have a really slow forum... makes me think that it's running on something made by Tandy in the 80's 😀
 
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Flash media isn't as delicate as many make it out to be. I've been running my Eee900 for 3 years now on Ubuntu, and it has a 16gb SSD which is really just a glorified flash drive. You can tweak any distro to reduce writes to the hd, it isn't work the hassle. That whole computer will probably be dead before the flash drive goes bad.

I don't know how that Via stacks up against Intel as far as clock speeds go, but I have Ubuntu 10.04 on my daughter's Eee 600mhz celeron, and while it's a little pokey, it's still usable.

And again, AFAIK, there isn't any specific "flash" Linux. Just pick a distro and install.
 
Thanks for the info... sounds like I was trying to preach to the metaphorical choir and failed 😳

Right now, just to keep this thread current, I'm waiting to hear on compatibility from WattOS and Puppy Linux.

EDIT: BTW, my native programming language is QBASIC... you still sure that I myself can tweak an OS to do anything but crash? :whiste:
 
laserhawk64 said:
EDIT: BTW, my native programming language is QBASIC... you still sure that I myself can tweak an OS to do anything but crash? :whiste:
Click to expand...

:^D

It isn't that hard. I'm not fluent enough to really give you tips, but there's some good guides on the web. While it isn't specific to your platform, you might be able to find some good tips on the Eee users forum. Specifically, look in the 7x sections. Those were the first Eees released, and they have slow processors, and small flash drives...

http://forum.eeeuser.com/index.php
 
essentially what you are describing is pupeee. which is puppy linux or the older EEEs with the ssds that do not intelligently distribute writes to prevent wear.

But again those specs are so low even puppy may be rough. You may be looking at having to drop down to Tinycore and customizing it.

http://tinycorelinux.com/

I am unsure if tinycore writes freqently to log files but you can always edit your confs to move the log file to /dev/shm and then setup logrotate to move them to /var/log once per day. if you crash/lose power then obviously that log is lost for the day though.
 
Well, I've got a thread open on Puppy's forum... we'll see what they say 😉

As for tinycore... no offense, but that actually looks worse than DSL, and it seems to have very little functionality compared to what I'm looking for.

I want something that essentially amounts to a full desktop OS (OK, not Ubuntu levels of functionality, but maybe Xubuntu levels...) on this little piece o' crap. I want to be able to run Firefox, some sort of decent office suite (need not be OOo, and it almost certainly *won't* be OOo), and other stuff.
 
Well...

I'm running Puppeee (a Puppy derivative) on my netbook right now, from a USB drive. It's actually pretty nifty...

:biggrin:

...but I wonder, since it's running pretty well on an ASUS Eee 1000HE, how it'll do on the (slightly modified) thin client...
 
I put CentOS 5.5 on a system like this without too much trouble. Just remember to do a custom partitioning scheme, and...

* Use ext2 file systems instead of ext3. The journaling built into ext3 will cause the CompactFlash drives to wear out quicker.
* Configure the boot loader NOT to use the MBR to boot from. Flash drives usually don't have an MBR.
 
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