[mythtv-users] New house - any advise?

Tim Phipps mythtv-users at phipps-hutton.freeserve.co.uk
Tue Jan 16 17:33:55 UTC 2007


On Tuesday 16 January 2007 16:25, Steven Adeff wrote:
> On 1/15/07, robin <robin at robinandmariette.com> wrote:
> > I want the main front ends to be diskless and silent (if possible). I was
> > wondering what is the currently recommended silent system. I've read
> > about people using eipa boards, is this still the best solution? Has
> > anyone tried running a front end from a large thumb drive? Or is network
> > boot to a ram drive still the best way to go?
>
> thumb drives are usually quite slow. Theres a few wiki entries,
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Creating_a_diskless_Debian_system
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Diskless_Frontend
>
I can second that, booting from a USB flash drive is slow with LILO. It was 
taking something like 30 seconds to load up about 3MB of kernel+initramfs. 
Once the kernel is up and the USB drivers are loaded it runs OK.

I've switched to using a IDE flash drive and it's much faster and still fairly 
cheap for 500MB. http://www.milesie.co.uk/asp/products3.asp?ProductCode=DOM 
if you're in the UK.

If I was building the frontend again I'd go for 1GB RAM and then hack the 
initramfs to copy the flash drive to the ramfs before running init. I did do 
this but I had only 512MB and the was so little free memory after booting 
that it had problems. Running off IDE-flash is nearly as snappy as running 
from RAM.

Cheers,
Tim.


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