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

[billy ball]

On Fri, 12 May 2000, Friedemann Baitinger wrote:

> 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.

The SuSE 6.2 'evaluation' CD-ROM (actually, a full distro) has a 'live'
filesystem... i've used it to boot to a Linux session... after you make a
link to a working XF86Config, X11 comes up and you go right into KDE...

i'd also use a flash memory card for storage... how much quieter can you
get? (aside from the beeps when initialized)...
 
> -- 
> 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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