real debian + real pda?

Hi, all

Background:

I'm pretty new to the list, tho I did get some help here the
other day installing intimate for the first time.

I've got my ipaq 3765 installed so it can boot the intimate
image on the pcmcia hard disk (a Toshiba 5GB), tho it broke
access from familiar (familiar can read the vfat partition
but not the ext3 partition). Haven't gotten networking set
up yet, so I don't have the full intimate installed yet.

Goal:

What I'd like to get is a PDA that I can carry around and do
PIM stuff (i.e. kind of like familiar) but also have all the
power tools from Debian when I want them (thus the 5GB
drive) (well, it's also for carrying my CD collection around
in MP3 format ;-).

What I'd rather not have to do is reboot to switch from
flash-based operation to hard-disk-based operation.

So what I want is to cardctl eject the hard drive when I'm
not using it (music files, docs etc) and still retain PIM
functionality. Heck, I'd even like to leave the sleeve
behind when I don't need the hard drive.

What I'm thinking is that I could do something like this:

1. start with a system where / is internal flash and /big
is the 5GB drive. /home is a symlink to /big/home,
/usr is a symlink to /big/usr, etc.

2. touch a file (to save a timestamp)

3. use the system as a PDA for a while. Try to hit every
feature and function I'd normally use.

4. use find with access-time filter to identify directories
that need to live in flash or ramdisk.

5. move them into flash.

6. (opt) change fstab so /big has noatime option (when I am
using the hard drive, I don't want it spinning up all the
time to write access times for files I got from cache,
right?)

What do you all think? Could this work? Should it be
based on Intimate? Familiar? Or will I have to start
from scratch?

Tony
Received on Wed Jul 30 2003 - 01:08:18 EDT