I would very much like to have a silent running low power PC for mundane tasks such as web browsing, document writing, etc. I have a 1.2GHz fanless mini-ITX board already but I need some guidance with the software side. I do not want to have to listen even to a laptop hard drive crunching away, so I plan to use NAS to store many GBs of data and make the PC solid state. I am not sure exactly what is the best way of doing it. At first I thought network booting was the way, but I recently I downloaded and used gParted, a live CD with partition and hard disk tools. It has a proper graphical interface with a desktop and the whole thing is only 30MB. It seems you can do a lot with a small amount of disk space, and since a good 1GB compact flash card is not that expensive, I reckon that will give me enough space to work with and will be speedy enough to replace a hard disk.

Ideally, I want a fully up to date Linux OS with gnome, firefox, IM, basic word processor, to run right out of the compact flash card. I want to be able to use any software like openoffice, the GIMP, etc, but that can be loaded from the NAS maybe? (this is where I really don't know how to go about setting it up). But I want the OS to behave like a regular OS installed to a hard drive where you can make changes to it and they will still be there after it is rebooted. As opposed to a Live CD running out of the compact flash card (i.e. not a "read only" OS).

As for the NAS, it is very likely I will make my own with a PC running ClarkConnect - www.clarkconnect.com (it will be a firewall and NAS box). It will have at least 250GB disk space, which I think can be set up as either FTP or Windows File Server (Samba?).


What do you think? Is it feasible? Or am I just crazy?

I don't see why it couldn't work. CF cards are pretty much the same as normal IDE drives, only the connector is a bit different.

I've been considering one myself for an old computer too.

Thats good I think I will try it then. Any recommendations for a Linux distro that can fit into 1GB disk space? Probably most modern ones will take more than that with their default installation?

Do you have to go for the default? It would probably be a bad idea..

Solid state devices have a limited amount of write cycles. Running a whole OS with a vanilla filesystem off one is certain to wear down the media pretty fast.

You need a custom approach where most writing is done over the network and the (read only) flash thing holds only the necessary files to boot or a RAM disk image.