Re: Floppy-EMC? and some other questions

["bfp" <bfp-at-earthlink.net>]

> Matt wrote
>
> First of all, I am very encouraged by, and interested in, the work that's
> been done lately on "ZipEMC", both yours, and Dave Schecter's.
>
thanks ,Dave has done most of the work on it lately
he has updated it to the latest EMC release and added a few enhancements
of his own to it ,looks like the test CD worked prety well
last I heard he was tripple booting Linux,windows and ZipEMC on the
windows partition of his system ,quite a trick


> > by using two floppy drives
>
> There's one problem with this. A lot of modern motherboards only support a
> single floppy drive. You'd have to install a controller card to run a
second.
> How about a system that uses a boot floppy and a CD for the root file
system.
> The configuration files could be on the floppy so that they could be
edited.
> Many modern BIOS can boot directly to the CD, but we'd still need a place
to
> put the config stuff (and CNC programs too!). I have a couple of
questions:
>
only one floppy? is that a BIOS limitation? I havent seen these ones yet
,you
could always just swap disks when prompted to but that could be a pain

> 1. What about swap space? Is it needed?
>
good question ,I think that by eliminating all of the graphics the swap
space
can be cut back or even eliminated ,X is a big ram hog
the operating system and EMC would have to be slashed to the bone to load
into a 6-8meg ram disk and the realtime kernel would use ~1meg
but I think that a system with 16-24megs of ram would handle it

> > single user mode ( runlevel 1,root access ,no login prompt)
>
> 2. Is this easy to do, and does it have any significant limitations
compared
> to the multi-user mode?
>
to try it just type "init 1" at the next prompt
to boot into it you can set the default runlevel to '1' in /etc/inittab or
pass init the
-single flag I think from lilo (I should check that) this run level is
normaly
for administrative use but as the root user you are still the system god

the floppyEMC idea is to make it more of a dedicated embeded system
rather than a general purpose workstation I was also looking at using one of
these
http://www.m-sys.com/product.asp?PID=12&FILE=docdimm2k&FAM=doc
but that will have to wait a while

Brian