EricAdles wonders how to format a CF card after loading the blob, kernel and ramdisk?

BillDanielson answers that although you can do all the formatting, etc on the TuxScreen itself (assuming you have the programs needed), he finds it more convenient to use his main x86 Linux system for building filesystems, formatting and copying data to the CF card. For hardware to connect the CF Flash card to an x86 Linux system, he uses a SanDisk SDDR-31 CF reader/writer. It connects to your x86 Linux system via USB. It is well supported on Linux 2.4 kernels and did not require any hand configuration with Mandrake Linux 8.0. It appears as a SCSI disk device and then you can use standard Linux programs to partition it, copy files/images to it, etc.

Useful programs/concepts to check out would be:

fdisk / sfdisk

mkcramfs -- a r/o compressed file sytem

mkfs.jffs2

mkcramfs is in the Linux kernel distribution in the scripts/cramfs directory.

TimRiker adds vfat, reiserfs and ext2 should all be built into the default kernel. cat /proc/filesystems to be sure.