A Compact Flash drive inserted into the new slot on the Libretto.
Copyright © 2009, Leslie Wright, All Rights Reserved.
Replacing the internal IDE drive of the Libretto with a Compact-Flash card is in itself nothing new, but since CF cards, are so cheap now, as to be almost disposable, I thought it would be cool, to be able to replace the CF card whenever I like, without having to open up the case.
I now have several cards from 1-8GB with various OS` on. One has DOS, and the others have various light distibutions of Linux, such as DeLi Linux, DSL etc.
The CF adaptor was purchased from e-bay, and I soldered on a short lenth of ribbon cable, so that when a card is inserted, it will stick outside of the case far enough to retrieve. (6mm)
I cut a slot in the original drive cover for the Compact flash card, and the end result is quite neat.
One silent Libretto, with interchangeable drives. As a bonus since CF uses much less power than the old IDE drive,I have extended battery life, even though the CPU is overclocked to 166MHz!
It is well known that CF cards `wear out`, that is, they only support a certain number of writes, before they die, but since it is quite cheap for a 1GB card, I have no issues with creating a swap partition for Linux, especially since this thing only has 16M of RAM!
I make the swap partition a little larger than normal though, at 250MB. There is no reason to expect a premature failure of the card, considering that 10 million r/w cycles represents an incredible amout of swap space usage.
It is wise to leave the last 40MB of the drive free (ie create an empty partition there), since if hibernation mode is enabled on the libretto it will dump its RAM contents there. (you dont want this to happen on your root partition, or your swap for that matter!)
Its a simple modification, so deserves little more explanation than is given by the following photos.
A Compact Flash drive inserted into the new slot on the Libretto.
A photo of the CF adaptor in place inside the case, along with its short length of ribbon cable.
The adaptor is simply glued in place.
The libretto running DeLi linux from flash.
Copyright © 2009, Leslie Wright, All Rights Reserved.