Re: FW: dual sleeves in intimate?

Hi

* James Conner (jim_at_secret.org.uk) wrote:
> All we use familiar for at the moment is kernel, modules and pcmcia support

Which seems fine, but it's not really all that simple because all of
those things then need to be kept in sync between Familiar and Intimate,
so every time I upgrade the kernel (which I tend to do only through
Familiar's kernel updates, rather than build my own) I have to make sure
that Intimate has all the matching kernel modules it is going to need
later in the boot, or pre-load them while Familiar is still in charge.

Personally I don't mind doing that, upgrading the kernel on my PC
has accumulated far more nuances, but I'd like to know that an apt-get
dist-upgrade has really upgraded everything, I'm not going to have to
reboot into Familiar just to run an ipkg upgrade for kernel/pcmcia. Two
OSes and two package managers seems a bit much for a little PDA ;)

> don't need familiar on flash... Tho' I have to ask what else you'd put on
> there.

Well, I'm coming at this very much from what is probably not an
especially common point of view - I don't ever take the dual sleeve off
my iPAQ, so I don't ever have to worry about what it's going to boot
into without a hard disk. That means I realise you're going to say "nice
idea, but most people don't see the iPAQ as a portable workstation, it's
a PDA!" ;)

Anyway, the only improvement (for me at least) I can think of would be
to have a jffs2 image which basically contains /boot, but with pcmcia
stuff as well. This would stay mounted after the Intimate root has been
mounted, much as /boot on a PC would (stuff like the pcmcia packages
would be installed into that partition and then be symlinked back to
wherever they would live normally).

> You still need a kernel and modules stored on flash, so that rules
> out CE... (Unless you plan on booting from CE, which already works... just
> without power management).

I would quite like to see dual-booting become easier, but I have no need
for Windows in my pocket, so I'll ignore that :)
 
> Feel free to mess around tho'.. I'd love to see so alternative ways to boot.

I'm a long term Red Hat user, so all this Debian stuff is a bit new to
me. I'll have a play around and see if I can come up with anything.
Obviously I don't expect it to be used too widely because I suspect most
people use their iPAQs without sleeves some of the time.

Cheers,

-- 
Chris "Ng" Jones
  chris_at_black-sun.co.uk
  www.linuxdude.co.uk