Installing Turnkey LAMP on thin client with multiple flash storage devices

Hello,
I am recycling a Wyse thin client* in to a small webserver. The installation seems to have completed successfully. At the moment the whole appliance is installed on a USB stick, the machine also boots from this USB stick. As there is also 500 MB intern flash memory available in the the thin client of what I expect that its faster then the USB stick, I wonder what would be the best way to make use of that memory.

I already tried a partition scheme during install where I made the internal memory / and made the following partitions on the USB stick /urs /home /var /temp plus swap. This resulted in an error message from the installer that it needs at least ~650 MB for /

As I have only a limited understanding of Linux (not touched it in over a decade) I am looking for something not to complicated.

* Wyse thin client originally running Win XPe - Via 800 Mhz cpu - 1 GB ram - 500 MB flash - no cd - no hd - 3X USB

Replies (2)

Alternatives: USB boot or PXE

Reply 1 2010-11-02

500MB is really very little for a full blown local filesystem. There isn't really much fat you can cut away from the LAMP stack to make the uncompressed filesystem fit in that space. Propose you just go with USB boot if that's what you want.

The alternative is PXE boot, which lets the thin client boot from a network file server drive (e.g., usually using NFS). The forums have at least one success story you can learn from, but it doesn't look trivial to setup.

Whatever route you choose, we're interested in how it goes. Good luck!

Make it swap?

Reply 2 2010-11-03

I guess I use it as swap space then.

So far everything seems to work fine, I can access the server and administration tools over the network. I used unetbootin to make the downloaded ISO run on a USB stick and from there installed it on to an other USB stick. If it ever go's on-live I will report back.

Thank you for the fast answer :)