Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Wed, 4 May 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
>
> > I now have a serial-cable digital camera for which I bought a 64MB
> > smartmedia card.  Could I run linux from this camera somehow over the
> > serial cable (could it be slower than running from zip disk?)
> > or at least from a USB card reader if I got one of those?
>
> You would need NFS. NFS over a serial link would be unbearable.

What is NFS and why would I need it?

I have photopc, which is 60K and works in linux to transfer files via 
serial cable.  If I had a 1-floppy linux could I use it to set up a 10MB 
RAMdisk on a computer and then transfer linux to the RAMdisk using 
photopc?  Photopc worked with BL2-ramdisk (from 2 floppy disks).  It was 
rather a slow transfer (about 5-10 sec per 50K image) so would be a slow 
boot but so was the parport zip drive method.  In theory a serial transfer 
could go as fast as 128 Kbit/sec - I think Steven actually measured the 
rate for serial cable file transfers and it was maybe half that.  Maybe 
8K/sec?  4 minutes to transfer 2MB of files to RAMdisk then run at normal 
speed.  I have seen Windows take longer than that to boot.

We also have a CF parallel port card reader that comes with DOS software, 
which would transfer files somewhat faster (faster than the parport zip 
drive?).

The kernel would need recompiling to give a larger RAMdisk size.

There is no particular advantage I can see to using one floppy disk plus 
one camera or parport memory card reader rather than two floppy disks, but 
this is interesting in theory.

The PCMCIA approach sounds more practical.  The card in the PCMCIA adaptor 
seems to be accessed as fast as a hard drive so no need for a RAMdisk.

The newer memory cards are much larger than fs.img for BL3.  Can you boot 
from a memory card on a new computer?

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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org