[Soekris] net 5501 booting with usb disk

[Bob Camp]

Hi

I keep thinking that the net550x is "big enough" to directly do  
development on. The normal development process is to do pretty much  
everything on a second machine. You then shoot the result to CF and  
see what happens. On the 550x you have enough RAM and other resources  
to run it like a normal PC.

Boot from CD probably isn't going to happen any sooner than boot from  
USB. Of course there may be something hidden in the new BIOS that we  
don't know about. Assuming that's true then you need a work around.

I suspect that you could put two images onto a big CF card. Set one  
image up to be your development boot and the other to be the final  
product boot. Keep the development boot partition fairly small and  
run most of it off of a big USB 2.0 flash stick.

To start the process you would need to seed the USB flash stick and  
CF cards from a PC with a CD on it. You could do it directly or via  
PXE. It's going to be harder to set up initially this way than to do  
the development on a PC.  The only advantage to the on 550x  
development is you only need a serial terminal if you do work in the  
field.

Fun to fiddle with, but maybe not worth the effort.

Bob Camp

On Jun 30, 2007, at 11:10 PM, Kannaiyan Natesan wrote:

> Thanks Bob.
> How would I go with the installation?
> Attach an CDROM first and install on CF and boot from there? Any other
> shortcuts available?
>
> Kannaiyan
>
> On 6/30/07, Bob Camp <soekris at cq.nu> wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> It would be *very* neat to be able to boot directly from the USB
>> flash. That seems to be a problem for most BIOS implementations. The
>> closest you can get with most boards is to boot from CF and then
>> mount the USB flash.
>>
>> Bob
>>
>>
>> On Jun 30, 2007, at 4:12 PM, Kannaiyan Natesan wrote:
>>
>> > Some one please help me how to get the 5501 to run from the usb  
>> flash
>> > disk. Can I install any image from windows or linux directly to the
>> > usb disk and make it to run from there? I want to use it as a PBX
>> > which storage option will be better?
>> >
>> > Thanks.
>> >
>> > Kannaiyan
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > Soekris-tech at lists.soekris.com
>> > http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
>> >
>>
>>
>