December PLUG meeting

[john]

Last night William Park demonstrated the use of a USB-memory stick to run a thin client to access resources that are located on a near-by server. The presentation assumed a knowledge of the concept 'Thin-Client'. In essence, it uses a bare-bone PC to operate on and with the resources of a separate server PC. Normally, a base Linux system is installed on the thin-client machine. Mr. Park's 'Thin-Client' USB memory stick does away with the need of having a base Linux system installed on the thin-client machine.
It is good to see new concepts to be demonstrated. Thanks goes to Mr.Park for coming all the way from Toronto to give this demonstration.
In the case where a thin-client does not have USB boot capability, a boot via a floppy could be used. Mr.Park also demonstrated this feature.
After the presentation I asked him about the particular type of memory stick he used. He pointed out that a Scan-Disk drive is not suitable. I found this interesting, because in my ignorance I was under the impression that a memory stick is a memory stick, regardless of the manufacturer. I guess it has something to do with the pre-formatting that is inherent in some of these devices. However, later on I was wondering if this could be overcome by using a floppy for booting?
Does anyone care to comment on this? In case Mr.Park reads this blurb, maybe he could give some insight into this.
John

[admin]

Did you mean a Sandisk, John? I was curious about why it won't work too. I have read that some USB sticks don't seem to work for Linux but I really don't know why as well. Maybe William will have some insight (or somebody else).

[Morc]

There are some Flash drives and flash memory in general that do not like Ext2/Ext3 filesystems.

[john]

You are right, Jason, I meant sandisk. I needed a magnifying glass to verify this.
As for Aaron's assertion that there are USB flashdrives around that do not
support the Ext2/Ext3 file system, it would be nice if he could tell us his
source of this information. Without a proof, it is just a rumor.
The memory sticks that use flash memory are internally organized similar to hard drives and floppies. They have a front end for boot purpose. Unfortunately the vendors cater to the MS-Windows market and put some crap into the front end to pedle their ware. With proper knowledge (which I don't have) it is possible to re-format any of these drives to get rid of the frontend garbage.
If you succeed in doing this, then there would be no reason to get a bootable thin-client basic linux onto the stick.
Am I talking nonsense or do I have a point
John

[admin]

I wonder if you could use a reiserfs instead and get around it then? I guess a reiser might not be best as it seems to use a 32 MB journal which would suck up quite a bit of the stick.

I'm not sure what William was talking about has to do with "booting" from a SanDisk but I can't speak for him. However, I can tell you that I boot from a SanDisk Mini Cruzer 256MB with DSL and it works fine. Haven't tried other distros but I should try William's version and see how it goes. The DSL forum does have users claiming to have success with certain brands of sticks and not with others - the same person installing the same version on a different brand of stick. This very well may be a USB support issue though and not the fact it's a stick.

[Morc]

As for Aaron's assertion that there are USB flashdrives around that do not
support the Ext2/Ext3 file system, it would be nice if he could tell us his
source of this information. Without a proof, it is just a rumor.

Personal experience and some reading actually.

On my Zaurus I cannot format my SD card as ext2 or I'll have a corrupt filesystem within a few days. To get it workng properly I have to format the card as fat then create an image which I then format as ext2. Then using the kernels loopback support I mount the image.