Linux Solutions

Welcome to the tutorial guide. The guide will provide a user with advice and guidance on how to boot from card without initrd and also how to perform sleeping and waking system on a card.

Let’s say you decided to install Arch Linux on a card and compiled your own kernel (or used the kernel26eee kernel) without initrd. Card reader on EeePC is connected as an USB device. Unfortunately, USB storage devices are detected with a delay, so we must tell the kernel to wait until this device becomes available. You do this with “rootwait” option passed to kernel at boot time.

Sleeping and waking system on a card
If you have Arch Linux on a card, waking up from sleeping state will most likely fail. The only solution is to enable the CONFIG_USB_PERSIST option in kernel. The kernel26eee package should have this option enabled.
The command to do this is:
echo 1 >/sys/bus/usb/devices/…/power/persist
Replace the “…” with the device like 1-3 or 1-5 where the first number is the bus and the second is the device
Each device that is connected to your computer gets an entry in the sysfs “system file system” it is a virtual file system.

Display doesn’t wake up properly
If you encounter black display after suspend/resume, consider using the “uswsusp” package (available in the official repositories) and correcting suspend2ram script in /etc/acpi, where you use this line to make the machine go to sleep:

/usr/sbin/s2ram –force –vbe_post –vbe_mode

If you followed advise and guidance as provided in this tutorial guide then you would have successfully learnt about booting from card without initrd