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Someone is coming over in 8 hours for help installing linux to a 4GB CF 
IDE drive (goes into a PCMCIA slot) on a 133MHz laptop with 48MB RAM 
(does not want to pay for more RAM even if it can hold more).
The idea is to use minimal power so as to prolong battery life.
Intended use is only wireless internet, with an orinoco card (needs 2.4 
kernel).  I know wireless cards use a fair amount of power to generate the 
radio signal.

48MB would probably run Seamonkey or Firefox so I plan to put on 
BL2 with glibc 2.3.6 update (by copying files from my laptop, to the drive 
inserted into it).

Can we make a lilo boot floppy to boot to this drive?  Pcmcia modules 
including ide-cs.o need to be loaded before the drive can even be 
recognized.

Another option is to use a DOS boot floppy and load BL from DOS with 
loadlin, but I would need help making an initfs.gz with the pcmcia 
drivers.  In the next 8 hours.

I have the BL3 loop initfs.gz as a model.  Do I replace the contents of 
linuxrc with instructions to load pcmcia modules?  Do I need to include 
/etc/pcmcia/config and /etc/pcmcia/start as well, and run start from 
linuxrc, then mount /dev/hde1 (or whatever it identifies as)?  Have mount 
in /bin and /bin on the path (in linuxrc).

Is there a better initfs.gz to use as a model some place?

Can these cards even be partitioned to fat and ext2 (two partitions)?
Loop linux does not work with kernel 2.4 (read-only file system for some 
reason) so we cannot use just a fat filesystem.

Other suggestions?

The puppy linux boot floppy has drivers for booting from CF drive (using 
grub).  I don't understand grub, but maybe there is something useful to be 
learned from it anyway.

If this works, he would have a portable linux usable in any laptop with 
pcmcia and floppy drive.  We have a 16MB CF card and pcmcia adaptor that 
could be used similarly.  Other live linuxes boot from USB flash drive but 
we have no computers new enough to do that.

We also have an order for a laptop for typing notes at a meeting and 
printing them (on a Tandy dot-matrix printer), which could be BL3 with the 
'wp' (pico-based) wordprocessor.  The laptop we have has no floppy drive 
so we might set it up with pcmcia modem and she can mail herself files 
too.  (Is there some easy way to do file transfer between computers via 
modem and phone cable instead?).  We don't have crossover ethernet cables 
or serial or parallel transfer cables to spare, but could also offer her a 
hub and two straight ethernet cables, but she would need to learn to run 
httpd or ftpd to access the files from Windows.  Other ideas?

Sindi Keesan