L3 news.

I have a balloon3 with 196MB RAM using CF wifi running Debian Etch on a usb 
memmory stick (2GB ext3 with an Etch chroot partition of about 600MB) 
including all the usual xorg and gtk dev packages as well as vncserver, 
gcc3.3 and 4.1. Current consumption (FPGA version) is 450-500ma when 
compiling nfs mounted (over wifi) code via the vncserver viewed remotely.

I put the etch debootstrap tgz on the balloonboard feed in case anyone 
wanted a handy image.

Problems log:
- Either the orinoco or hostap wifi networking dies with "card reset" 
failures under heavy load eg when waking up Thunderbird on a remote 
x-server. I have also had problems with the wired CF ethernet adaptor. This 
may be due to some deep pcmcia stuff or ???
- I was getting loads of unexpected yaffs errors but I am unclear what is 
producing them - udev on running udevstart seemed to create a lot of output 
about i/o errors on mtdblock0 - what is it trying to do?? If it is test 
mounting a vfat partition or something then that might account for it. Now 
the problems have .. err .. gone away. Perplexing.
- The ext3 module seemed to loose its marbles on modprobe due to unresolved 
names and so the ext3 partition reverts to ext2. This is fixed by building 
ext3 into the kernel.

The large memory model we are about to test later this afternoon is hoped 
to double the available ram.

I am creating another rootfs that includes preinstalled udev pcmciautils 
and wireless-tools. Usage of this seemed coincident with the yaffs errors 
going away.

Nick Bane