Last night, Christian and I were able to get Puppy Linux up and going on the little embedded computer we are trying to get ready to go into the the volcano. The version we ran was a special build of an older version that was modified so that it could run on the processor in the system. It ran very, very slowly because of the nature of the hardware we are using. Still we learned a lot. The take-away knowledge from this effort was that Puppy Linux is an absolutely killer Linux distribution for limited hardware. I have an older computer I lent to a friend that is coming back in the next week or two that I am going to set up to run Puppy Linux. The only thing we need it for is to run Samba, CUPS, and Firefox. It will do all that quite well, but the hardware is just to limited on our Norhtec MicroClient JrSX to run a desktop. Really the only thing we want to do with this system is capture images at intervals, store them to the flash disk, and transmit them via Ethernet to another system on demand.
I have been putting off learning how to build custom systems using Embedded Debian because the learning curve looks a little bit steep, but I think that is what I need to do for this project. The reality is that jumping into something new like this will help me with other projects I have wanted to do. The pain of starting something this big almost always pays off in the end, but it is always painful and frustrating to learn complicated new things, especially when they are as minutiae laden as this one. The funny deal is that it gets fun and exciting once you make the decision to set aside the time and jump into it.