Hi!

> : Yes, 4MB is tight, but I remember running i386 linux in that ammount
> : (with normal distribution). [It involved heavy swapping however]. If
> : you can swap onto flash (will not that kill flash too fast?), it
> : should be workable.
> 
> Swapping to flash is a bad idea.  You'll wear them out too quickly.
> 
> : Most flashes are ATA-flashes and I believe you need to use IDE for
> : them. There are some obscure flashes without ATA interface. 
> 
> Right.  I have a few 4MB Linear flash cards, which can be directly
> mapped into memory at the bridge level iirc (don't have the docs
> handy).  I've seen the linear flash cards as large as 32M.  They are
> hard to program and some laptops cannot program them (I think that the
> MobilePro doesn't have the +12V needed for Vpp to program them with).
> That might be an alternative, but these cards are getting hard to find
> and are generally small or expensive.  (on ebay right now, there are
> only 4MB cards).

Anyway, if you directly-map memory read/write from linear flash, you
are likely to wear it out, too. (Altrough it may save problems for
read-only mappings). 

Also speed is likely to be bad: PCMCIA was ISA last time I saw.

> One might also want to consider SRAM cards, but these are expensive as
> well and I've not seen more than 2MB for a SRAM card.

OTOH you can use them r/w without killing them fast.

								Pavel

-- 
I'm pavel@ucw.cz. "In my country we have almost anarchy and I don't care."
Panos Katsaloulis describing me w.r.t. patents at discuss@linmodems.org