I'm doing something similar with FreeBSD instead of Linux. I just purchased a 486sx/33 (not pc/104; it's the TimeLine $99 surplus embedded PC people have been talking about on this list.) It arrived w/o HD or floppy, and the floppy connector is a bit non-standard. It has an ISA port, however, so I burned FreeBSD's bootp/tftp netboot loader into a 27128, plugged that into a 3c509 and the system booted diskless just fine (mounting / and /usr from a server via nfs). For your application, that's all you'd need -- the boot loader can be configured to immediately boot on power-up (by default it prompts first). For my application (wearables), I'll next connect a 2.5" HD or Flash disk and use the diskless OS to write a boot image -- w/o ever using a floppy. All of this should apply to PC/104 network cards as well. This configuration requires ~14MB on the server but it's a general-purpose install w/full copies of /etc files and system binaries (/bin, /sbin). For a special-purpose system you'd only need to include the binaries actually used for your application (e.g., init, ifconfig, mount, nfsiod, /etc/rc, /lib/*, inetd, httpd, ...) so the overhead on the server would be quite small. You should be able to support multiple nodes all sharing one set of files -- you can export them r/o to ensure they aren't modified accidentally. Here are some links: http://freebsd.org/~fsmp/HomeAuto/HomeAuto.html - FreeBSD home automation (includes diskless node configuration) http://www.freebsd.org/~abial - PicoBSD - minimal FreeBSD squeezed on a single floppy Mark BTW before anyone asks, I was planning to post more info on the TimeLine 486 w.r.t. use as a wearable when I get a chance (it arrived yesterday), assuming no one else does so first. At 01:09 AM 4/10/98 -0400, pavan wrote: >I was wondering if anyone could help me out here. I'm working on a project >in college (WPI), where we have to build a Network based video surveilence >system. Unlike some systems which use a camera that has inbuilt networking >capabilities, we have to build a general purpose computaion node >( A really small computer that you can plug a cameraor two or as a >matter of fact any other device into). Because of the small form factor >and a PC compatible architecture we deceided to use a PC104 system. Because of >various other advantages we deceided to use run linux on the box. Well as >you can see this is very similar to wearables except for two things 1) No >HMD and keyboard even though you should be able to plug one in and 2)No >Disk (will use a Solid State one instead). > >So I was wondering if there is anyone out there who got linux to boot on >a pc104 through a solid state disk or through netboot (or anyother >loader). Or if there are any better solutions I'd love to know about them.
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