Rafe wrote:
> Nec MobilePro 780
> NetBSD 1.6.1
> 
> Still new to NetBSD and running UNIX OS from such a
> small platform.  Since I am so new, sometimes my
> questions are completly off track.  If someone could
> point me in the right direction, I am glad to figure
> the rest out as I go.

We will help you out however we can.

> Has anyone had any luck with the Magicstor 2.2+ GB
> microdrives?  I have had some success with a SanDisk
> 512MB CF card, but found I kept getting out of swap
> space errors when trying to compile large programs. 

I can't help you with that issue in particular. I have been using a 1 GB 
Microdrive as well as a 512 MB CF card.

> Is it true that I don't want to make a swap file when
> using soild state cf storage cards?

Yes. Solid state storage is limited to something like 1000000 writes as 
I remember. If you are doing writes to CF all the time because of swap, 
in theory, you will rack up writes very quickly. I am not aware of 
anyone actually running into this problem in practice though. On hpcmips 
and hpcarm system I run without swap and with options enabled that 
minimize disk writes.

> Some how I did get the kernel to compile one time with
> just the 32mb of main ram and no swap file, but I have
> not been able to do this since.  Do people ever make
> tempory swap files - compile the large program or what
> ever and then remove the swap file again?

Because NetBSD packages are binary compatible across multiple hardware 
platforms, I just use a Cobalt RaQ 2+ to compile any programs I need. 
Both NetBSD/hpcmips and NetBSD/cobalt generate mipsel (MIPS little 
endian) packages. My RaQ 2+ has 256 MB of memory and a 40 GB disk so it 
works just fine. I can compile packages for you if need be. I hope that 
information helps.

Bryan