Well, this is not much of a question, it's more a "How to" guide.

I've been testing 72ka's bootpacks for quite some time now (since version 0.5, to be exact) -- great work, by the way! -- and I have done some things that, I think, are important to share with others.

Every time someone writes about GPE running on the Z72 they complain about the poor performance of the system.

I may be saying something everyone already knows, but I'll take my chances.

I thought: "Well, maybe if GPE ran on a native ext2 partition, instead of a loop device, it would be faster". And then I started my experiments.

Using a trial version of Mobile Stream CardReader (http://www.mobile-stream.com/cardreader.html), I managed to partition my 1GB SD card as if it was a pen drive (through /dev/sda).

I created a 256MB FAT16 (fdisk type 06) partition formatted as vfat, a 128MB linux swap partition (type 82, I think), and the rest of the space I used for a native linux partition formatted with the ext2 filesystem.

For the next steps, I mounted /dev/sda1 on /media/sda1 and /dev/sda3 on /media/sda3.

Next thing, I copied cocoboot.prc and CardReader.prc (for troubleshooting purposes) to /media/sda1/PALM/Launcher and the files cocoboot.conf and zImage to /media/sda1.

Then I created a "bogus" initrd.gz with the following commands:

• touch /media/sda1/initrd
• gzip /media/sda1/initrd

After that, I mounted 72ka's opie.ext2 on /media/opie and copied all of the files to the ext2 partition on the SD card:

• cp -a /media/opie/* /media/sda3/

After copying the files, I edited /media/sda3/etc/fstab to automagically activate the swap partition, and mount the FAT partition on /media/card, by appending the following lines to the file:

/dev/mmcblk0p1 /media/card vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/mmcblk0p2 none swap sw 0 0

Now all that was left for me to do was to edit /media/sda1/cocoboot.conf, so that it would boot from /dev/mmcblk0p3. The only thing that needed to be changed is the cmdline parameter.

cmdline = noinitrd root=/dev/mmcblk0p3 ro rootdelay=1

Explaining:

noinitrd

so that cocoboot doesn't process the bogus initrd.gz during initialization;

root=/dev/mmcblk0p3

to tell it which partition to boot from;

ro

Read-only mount at boot, to make sure e2fsck can check the partition;

rootdelay=1

It took me a long time to realize the system needed a second to mount the partition before it could boot.

There you go. Now just figure out how to install GPE on Palm Z72 (just wait for my next topic/guide: How to install GPE on your Palm Zire 72 without having to compile anything) and you'll have a very functional and fast Linux on your handheld.

Or, if you prefer, keep using Opie, only a lot faster.

Hope this guide was somehow helpful.

Sorry for any spelling/grammar errors, but I don't get to practice my English much here in Brazil.

See ya!