wiki: will do. I didn't know I had the perms to create wiki pages on emc2. I thought about using the real ubuntu server install. I was going to try that if this method hit a wall. You can compress the dd images using gzip on the fly too, send dd output to stdout and pipe to gzip. Then do in reverse. I had both drives installed when I used dd, so it was a direct copy, no intermediate file. Took forever tho, I didn't tune my buffer size! The flash write cycle limits playing a part there. I am aware that flash is a read-then-write memory when the write buffer is smaller then the flash's write buffer size. I would like to do away with swap all-together and just have physical memory limits but I am not sure how the emc2 and other apps will respond to that. Maybe some apps just expect that a swap would exist. The install warns of this if you don't choose a swap part. Have you ever done this? I would create a swap out of memory, but isnt that just redundant!!
I have also been interested in headless EMC, i.e. EMC GUI on remote system. I think I already posted last week about it. However, now that I have played with it, I do like seeing what emc2 is doing while I am at the machine. So I think debugging g-code on remote machine then loading on the machine itself and seeing the monitor is the way to go. I plan to get a small touchscreen monitor soon and mount on the machine on a swivel arm. If I move emc2 to a lighter embedded processor then I will go headless and simple DRO instead. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stephen Wille Padnos Sent: Monday, January 07, 2008 3:58 PM To: Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Installing emc2 on Compact Flash drive Colin MacKenzie wrote: > This is an informative thread only, but I got an installation of emc2 > on a 2GB compact flash drive which plugs into my IDE on my > motherboard. I have an all solid state emc2 controller with wireless > network and card reader. Pretty slick. I plan on getting a small touch > screen and keyboard to mount on the machine too so its all self > countained. > Cool. I have a full install, including developer tools, on some 8GB SSD drives. They have about 3.1GB used, though I never bothered to uninstall anything. It's likely that an install of the server version of 6.06LTS would be a better way to start, then add the EMC2 repositories and install. > To get emc2 ubuntu live cd to install on the flash took some work. The > min installation is just under 3GB. I first installed on a 10GB HD, > then uninstalled openoffice and other unneeded apps. Then shrunk the > partition, direct copied (dd) the partition to the CF card. The CF > card already had a partitioned swap and identical sized linux part > that I created. Reinstalled GRUB to the MBR on the CF and it worked! > There's a tool called partimage which I used to get the data off. I had made a dd copy, but at ~8GB, that's a bit unweildy. The PartImage compressed image was ~900MB. I did it as a partition image, rather than a full disk, but it supports either. It's a lot like Ghost, if you're familiar with that. I'm not sure how well flash will work as swap. Although the technology has kept improving, there are still write cycle limits for flash drives. > Chances are, you could probably do the same thing on a 2GB USB Flash > Drive if your motherboard supports USB Flash Boot (most modern ones > do). You would definitely need 2GB tho, my linux part is 93% used > right now! Not much space left. (There are probably lots more useless > stuff that I can remove but interdepedancy with gnome makes it tough, > such as the sounds.) > Heh - yep. Though there has been lots of talk about headless EMC2 computers running the machine, using another PC for the GUI. This is what my application was for - the embedded machine has no display/keyboard, if you need to communicate with it, you plug in an ethernet cable and use ssh. I have some fairly minimalist runscripts to make runlevel 2 perform better for RT. I'll post them on the wiki when I have a chance. If you can, please either create a wiki page with your information, or if there's already a page that covers embedding EMC on a flash drive, please update it. Thanks - Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
