Things you might need to know

It's worth appreciating that FlashLinux makes a certain number of assumptions about your system in order to make life easier for the average user. In some cases (and for more advanced (!) users) there are things you can do at boot time that will give you more choice over what your system does and how it interacts with your hardware.

Adding options to the kernel at boot time

When faced with the "grub" boot menu, select the boot option you're interested in (the second option down to boot the USB key is normal) and press the "E" key to edit the entry. Then use the down arrow or cursor key to select the like starting with the word "kernel", pressing "E" again to edit the line. You should then be able to pan left and right through the default kernel options (with the left / right arrow / cursor keys) and make modifications.

When you've finished making changes, press "Enter" to save the changes and press "b" to boot the system with your changes taken into account. Note that these changes are NOT persistent and will be lost on reboot. To save the changes you will need to boot your system, mount your boot device on /boot and change the options in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

Recognising USB keys

How does FlashLinux know where things are? Well, it looks for a boot partition on all available block devices by searching for a ".encryptec" file, the first device found with this device in it's root directory is taken as the boot device and that partition is taken as the boot partition. Partition number #2 on that device is then taken as the ROOT device. (normally partition 1 is a 4Mb boot partition and partition 2 is the 240Mb root)

To change this behaviour, you can add the following option;
usbroot=<n>
This forces FL to use partition <n> as the ROOT filesystem as opposed to partition number #2. So for example, if for some (strange) reason you had a 4Mb boot partition, a 64Mb DOS partition and then a large FL parition (in slot 3) , you could add the line;
usbroot=3
And the system should boot as desired.

Mounting a key on /home

This is relatively easy, format a key with an ext2 partition and write a zero lengh file in it's root called ".home".

Ignoring local hard drives

Once upon a time, some strange partitions caused the local hard disc detection to hang up and cause FL not to boot properly. This [should] be fixed. However if you don't want your machine to see the local hard drives automatically, add the "nodisc" option.

Using a Modem

To stop the machine defaulting to and trying to boot up in a LAN configuration, add the option "nodhcp".

Changing the default screen resolution for "X"

Modify the existing screen resolution option on the command line, for example you can limit the available resolutions by changing the 1280x1024 to 1024x768. Note that once the machine has booted you can cycle through available resolutions using <CTRL><ALT><+>.