Loop device and memory question?

[it0]

As a newbie I have 2 questions

1 At the moment  I have OZ 3.3.5 and a 43MB loop device on my sd card which works fine.

How do I mount this automaticly during startup? At the moment I have an entry in /etc/fstab like this
/mnt/card/loop/part /mnt/loop ext2 defaults,loop 0,0

which mount the part file on /mnt/loop fine, however it cannot be mounted on startup as the sd card is not mounted using the fstab (I guess)

If I do this after startup I have to restart opie so it can find the applications installed on there, is there an easier way?

2 Memory, at the moment I have a 32/32 mb layout, but what does that mean? I can install apps in /mnt/ram but does that mean I have less ram to run apps in? Or if /mnt/ram is full, do I still have 32MB ram free to run apps in?

[lardman]

If I do this after startup I have to restart opie so it can find the applications installed on there, is there an easier way?

Can you not just install them directly to the card? Why are you using a loop device (I\'ve no idea what it is).

2 Memory, at the moment I have a 32/32 mb layout, but what does that mean? I can install apps in /mnt/ram but does that mean I have less ram to run apps in? Or if /mnt/ram is full, do I still have 32MB ram free to run apps in?

The Z has 64Mb total, so you have 32Mb for running apps and 32Mb for storage.


Si

[it0]

If I do this after startup I have to restart opie so it can find the applications installed on there, is there an easier way?

Can you not just install them directly to the card? Why are you using a loop device (I\'ve no idea what it is).

The loop device  can be used to mount a file as a filesystem. I do this because I don\'t want to format the sd card with ext2 or alike. This way I have more I have the benefits of ext2 on the fat formatted card.

[Stubear]

it0,

Your best bet is to mount them via a script run from /etc/rc.d/rc.local or anytime after the sd script in /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/ is run. I\'d go for rc.local as it\'s the last script run prior to running qpe.sh (you could put it here too)

Lardman,

Loop device allows you for example to load a filesystem image (ususally floppy image or CD/DVD iso) without having to burn the image to disk/floppy. Great for testing images before you burn them.

It also allows you to mount compressed filesystem images (usually cramfs) without having to decompress them first. The roms for 5x00 series are cramfs images (actually not sure about 5600). The Cacko 1.21 rom used a loop device to mount the /usr directory (41.2M) from a 22.1M image, saving room in the root flash partition. The main disadvantage is that they are readonly (but in the case of the cacko example so is the root flash partition)


Stu