When I was thinking of setting up a PVR to record OTA digital tv with kaffeine, I bought Rudy Hartmann's Rausch Netzwerktechnik Model XXL-USA 1U Rackmount Server for a low-profile, low-power solution, trying to reduce my carbon footprint, be as green as possible....chicks dig it!
Well, that never happened, I put the board in a smallish ATX case, and that turned into a webserver for GF's website, for which I got a lot of help, here, thanks to all read more...
This box is, of course, on 24/7/365.25, electric costs are high and rising, so back to being green, saving some money, hopefully
Something that caught my eye:
Installing Tinycore Linux (v2.7) with Apache and Samba
Introduction
My aim was to create a web server on a Compact-Flash based thin client. read more...
and I was off to the google races.
To make a long story short,
- I found a WinNet VI Thin Client Terminal, sold by timcstern at
- looked at this sexy 4-card pci adapter from Addonics
- decided on a single CF, direct plug-in, right-angle ide adapter from a local company to plug in the 40-pin onboard ide connector, since the pci slot was blocked by the old pc133 simm I happened to have, see pic:
I counted 72 connectors in that laptop-memory-socket-looking-thingy and have had a hell of a time googling for something that fits there. When I look at a lower angle, I think I see a second set of contacts, making it 144-pin, which seems to be a common older laptop memory, relatively readily available. Could someone verify that for me, please, or stop me before I etrans again?
Since Puppy runs completely from memory, it makes for a relatively snappy desktop experience, except for reads, more-so writes to the CF. I have this and this on the way to improve that and because I can't help myself. Really, http://www.lanlesalon.com is very simple, static with nobody knowing it is there, not to mention ugly and I am working on that, too. However, we want to have the presence to try to bolster business in these slow times, a little.
The cf/ide adapter fits tight down over some capacitors; it's powered through a floppy connector on the board and all I had around was this ide power connector splitter. Also on hand was this older Kingston 512M CF card, which I formatted to ext3 on one partition using the whole space. At this point, I need to install an OS onto the flash with my desktop, running Mandriva 2010.2. Puppy Linux has proved very capable for my usage in the past and I had a CD with 4.2 on it. Booted to that livecd and running Puppy's Universal Installer, I was impressed to find a choice to install to CF connected via USB and later to be used in a cf/ide adapter, just the ticket! However, this did not boot for me, back to google.
Amongst many older reports of failure, a large amount of activity around this sort of hardware/os configuration, I wound up following Installing Damn Small Linux (DSL) Using Ubuntu.... Note the typo; unetbootin is in Mandriva contrib. I had downloaded a small version of Puppy (96M), pup-431-small.iso It was a piece of cake to start unetbootin and point it at the iso. Plugged the card back into the Igel, pressed the power button and, bingo-bango, Bob's your uncle:
I was impressed, again, how Puppy explains almost every configuration step with tips about what to do if something goes wrong: very user friendly. In the picture, I have connected a cable to the router, Puppy "Connect" walks me through dhcp almost automatic setup, and I am downloading/installing Monkey, another web server I might figure out. Again, there are copious messages about what is going on; the picture shows what happens when one clicks on "Test urls" to see if the offered repository servers are online, or not.
Thanks for your support.