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Cheers! Are you a Manuel Kasper disciple too? I just upgraded my 3-year old net4501, developed with Manuel's old MiniBSD notes, to a PC Engines WRAP 1.E board, also running FreeBSD 6.2 on a 32 MB flash.

Both the Soekris and the WRAP are the most fun routing platforms I've ever played with. Of course, at $300, its not as cost-effective as a WRTG54L but much more of a learning experience.

I got a 2.5" IDE<>flash adapter and installed a 1GB cf with miniBSD

You should at least boot if from a Compact Flash card

silent, no heat, droppable (kinda)

I've got no references for GNAA/Linux but FreeBSD has a sectionin the Handbook [freebsd.org]

And my fellow 9fan [google.com] Matthias showed me a handy reference guide [neon1.net] and bunch of scripts for the binaries you want. Well that's for non-X, my next stage of my project is trying to get my EPIA working in SVGA mode or, if I get a big enough CF card (I think a 256Mb should work and they are about $50 on ebay). I'm trying for an in car system. I already got it playing mp3s from the CD Rom 35 seconds from power.

pp

You might also find it interesting to read about other efforts for making small systems on other OS, amongst others flashboot, flashdist, MeshBox, Pebble Linux. You'll probably also learn a lot about this by examining how 'live-cd' software is prepared (e.g. livecd.sf.net, knoppix).

A lot of these techniques are aiming at small single-task embedded systems (often on minimal hardware, e.g. net4501/net4801), but the techniques are generally applicable, and can be used to make all types of system on various OS.

You should at least boot if from a Compact Flash card

silent, no heat, droppable (kinda)

I've got no references for Linux but FreeBSD has a sectionin the Handbook

And my fellow 9fan Matthias showed me a handy reference guide and bunch of scripts for the binaries you want. Well that's for non-X, my next stage of my project is trying to get my EPIA working in SVGA mode or, if I get a big enough CF card (I think a 256Mb should work and they are about $50 on ebay). I'm trying for an in car system. I already got it playing mp3s from the CD Rom 35 seconds from power.

I have an in-car PC that runs FreeBSD.

It boots an EPIA 5000 from a 32Mb CF card and plays mp3s from any of the cds in the NEC 4 disk CDROM.

I hope to add a 7" lcd to it soon and see what I can make it do next.

Hopefully when my GPS mouse comes I can do some sort of homebrew routefinder

My fello 9fan Matthias has done a bit of a walkthrough with scripts for making FBSD fit in under 32Mb

You might want to have a chat with this guy. mk@neon1.net the writter of the minibsd tutorial.

You might want to have a chat with this guy. mk@neon1.net the writter of the minibsd tutorial.

Purely out of interest, how'd you know that?
I wouldn't have guessed it, but looking at the wifibsd kernel's resemblance to the recommended kernel entries for minibsd, it appears you're right. I'm guessing you've either got inside knowledge, or scary familiarity with minibsd. Which is it, or am I completely off track?

I own one of the 800 MHz Mini-ITX boards. With a Compact Flash card as a hard drive, a little bit of RAM and a reduced FreeBSD operating system you can have a good firewall, DHCP server, DNS server or anything you want. They are very quite and can be placed in a drawer or small cabinet. I have tried Windows XP and it can play mp3s and movies fairly well. The newer versions are better for multimedia.

Actually, there already is a miniBSD. But it fits on a 64MB compact flash card, so go figure.