[Peeweelinux] Filesystem Issues

[Stefan Willmert]

Hello everyone,
Due to the lack of current documentation, I have a few questions. I'm a new 
PeeWeeLinux user, and so far, it has helped me tremendously. I have an embedded 
device using a compactflash as the harddrive. I have easily created a system on 
flash using a USB flash reader to setup the boot system, which successfully boots my 
device. 

Now, for my questions:
1. I would like a read-only root filesystem on one partition, and a read-write 
filesystem on a second partition. The second partition will store config files, log 
files between power cycles of the embedded device. Since PeeWeeLinux seems to re-
partition the device each time I load the system, what is the best way to maintain 
two partitions?

1a. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to use a read-write partition? 
For example, the ramdisk is great because I can power down my embedded device 
without worrying about corrupting the root filesystem. I do need to maintain config 
files and log files which change during the operation of my device, so obviously, I 
need a method to store this information between power cycles. Hence, a read-write 
partition. It would be nice, however, to not have to worry about corrupting the read-
write partition if a user just hits the power button. Any suggestions or best 
practices from anyone here?? Perhaps there is a way to write all config files as 
power loss is detected? I seem to recall reading something about some devices which 
maintain power just long enough to store config files. Does anyone have any 
knowledge in this area?

2. Is there any documentation on how to use the custom features of PeeWeeLinux? I 
have custom applications which need to be included, plus I will obviously be 
modifying system scripts, etc. Ultimately, I want an image that I can easily load 
onto a new flash disk without any further configuration once my initial system is 
built.

3. In the same regard, certain config files need to be updated during operation of 
my device. (ex. network ip address, etc). I would expect a user to have the ability 
to modify the ip address while the device is running. I would also like to maintain 
these changes after a power-cycle. With a ramdisk, this is not possible. Any 
suggestions? If i can get a read-write partition to work, I could probably modify 
the load scripts to mount the partition and read the network config files from 
there. Any thoughts?

These are just initial questions as I dig into PeeWeeLinux. Any suggestions you have 
would be greatly appreciated. I will dig into the setup scripts and perhaps make 
some modifications to suit my purpose. However, I don't want to change too much as 
it will create problems as new versions of PeeWeeLinux are created.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

-stefan willmert