[ltp] Turning a TP into a qiet X-station

[Friedemann Baitinger]

I spent some thoughts lately to generate a bootable CDROM for my
ThinkPad which would load a Linux kernel plus everything needed to run a
nice and _quiet_ X-server. I would completely turn off the hard disk,
probably even remove it to save the weight and increase battery life.

I did some invesigations with ramdisks and initrd but so far I had no
luck to get such a setup running. To debug it, I created a 50MB initrd
image which had everything on board to run a 'chrooted' environment. I
made an entry in the /etc/lilo.conf to point to a known good kernel and
the initrd.img file. Then I booted into that environment, the initrd
image got decompressed an loaded nicely, the kernel initialized itself 
up to the point where the root file system needed to be mounted. That
never worked so far although I step by step followed the instructions in
'man initrd' and also '/usr/src/linux/Documentation/initrd.txt' I was
never able to mount the ram filesystem as the new root at the end of
kernel initialization. I not even managed to get to the point where
/linuxrc from the initrd filesystem should be executed.

Any ideas? Has this been tried before? Are there any alternative
approaches to achieve the same goals? No, diskette boot is not an
option, it takes too long and I never have attached a diskette drive to
the ThinkPad anyway.

-- 
Friedemann Baitinger       fb@baiti.net      http://baiti.net/fb

Source code is like manure. If you spread it around things grow.
If you just hoard it, it just smells bad

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