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>I'm sure it's not too hard. If one had enough money to spend, a 40MB
>drive might be able to have X and Emacs (MAYBE), and you
>could boot with a boot disk and use the mount root=/dev/whatever
>command, or boot from the hard drive, and mount the
>Flash card under /USR.
40 MB is more than plenty for X, Emacs, and other basic utilities.
Remember that 40 MB was a respectably sized disk drive when those
programs were written. But there are some problems with doing things
so simply:
1) If the root is on the hard disk, it still seems likely to spin
up every now and then. So it's probably best to have the root
on the flash card.
2) If /usr is on the flash card, a lot of the files and directories
there must be replaced by symlinks pointing to the hard disk.
3) If the hard disk is mounted as a file system, I still fear that
it might spin up unnecessarily sometimes. So it may be necessary
to automount it by NFS and unmount it when not in use.
But all of this should be doable with some effort.
Somewhat harder is the case with the 10 MB flash card, which is
not really enough for the most common system and user files.
For that case, the idea of putting system files into a ramdisk
and user files on the flash card sounds doable, but more work.
It's kind of interesting to see what happens to OS configuration
when ram is cheaper than "disk" space.