[Peeweelinux] embedded linux for robots... newbie questions

[Ken Emmons, Jr.]

Salut,

I would be careful witht he PCMCIA adapter for the flash disk, see previous posts. 

Multiple Ramdisks like in peewee are pretty nice since you can just shut the power off and everythign will execute and load faster out of RAM instead of loading form a slow falsh device. The compressed RAm images are even faster booting because they read less information form the slow flash drive.

Don't sweat the NAND and NOR stuff, jsut use a good SanDisk Compact Flash card with a good ATA to Compact Flash adapter (I don't recommend PCMCIA at all....). You can find adapters on the peeweelinux page and other sources.

You don't seem to care about the disk size,s o use XFree86 and regular glibc that comes with peewee, you;ll be surprised at how much you can fit on a 32mb card ;-)

If you are to run your host for development you may want to consider setting up a mainstream distro with a hard disk and get that working first before trying to embed it. You can always take your application and compile it as static if there are some funky incompatabilities with what peewee installs (for instance, I compile a GTK+ program as static, and it si 3MB in size but I don't have to install GTK+ on the embedded system..)

Hope this helps,

~Ken