Pocket ISR
Ian Kalinowski and Woon Ho Jung

Our goal is to get a fully-functional ISR system to boot off of an
external USB hard drive.  We are starting with the Knoppix Linux
distribution since it includes hardware detection software.   This will
enable the Pocket ISR device to boot on a wide range of computer hardware.
Our initial host system will be the IBM Thinkpad T41p laptop that is used
for the ISR beta test and we will be using a 40 GB USB 2.0 hard drive.

Once we get the system to boot, we can combine work with other groups such
as CD ISR to strip the Knoppix system down to only the necessary software.
We can also test booting on other host machines.  We may also try to use
other USB devices to boot into an ISR system.

The general approach we expect to take will be to configure the boot
process to use an initial ramdisk (initrd) to load the appropriate USB
drivers to load the root filesystem off of the USB hard drive.  If we are
unsuccessful with this approach, we might try to compile the Linux kernel
with all the USB drivers built-in and apply publicly available kernel
patches to boot from USB.