On 8/1/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Scot Jenkins</b> <<a href="mailto:scotjenkins@gmail.com">scotjenkins@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On 8/1/06, Harv Nelson <<a href="mailto:ai9nl@arrl.net">ai9nl@arrl.net</a>> wrote:<br>> what is the current lap top of choice for linux. full debian install. of<br>> course price will be a prime consideration. I plan to carry it in the truck
<br>> and use mostly for mobile Ham radio communications.<br>><br>> thanks<br>><br>> Harv<br><br>Shop <a href="http://ebay.com">ebay.com</a>, <a href="http://materialsprocessing.com">materialsprocessing.com
</a> (surplus store) or <a href="http://ibm.com">ibm.com</a><br>("certified used equipment") for a slightly older Thinkpad.<br><br>Remove the hard drive and get a CF/PCMCIA adapter and as big a<br>CompactFlash card as you can afford. I believe you can get up to 4 GB
<br>cards now, which should be plenty for linux. I'm running a healthy<br>Debian install on a 4 GB hard disk partition on my laptop and it's<br>only using about 2 GB.<br><br>Enter the laptop's BIOS and configure it to boot from PCMCIA. Install
<br>linux to the flash and you have a solid state machine that will fair<br>much better than any hard drive in a vehicle.<br><br>scot<br><br></blockquote></div><br>If you run your system from a flash card, you should really have a lot of places mounted as tempfs. Areas like, /var/log and /tmp should be tempfs- plus i'm sure there are a few other areas(google it). Plus, no swapfile!!!
<br><br>The reason for this is that the number of writes to flash memory is relatively limited compared to hard drives.<br><br>