Write cycles are limited in flash drives. A memory cell can usually be written to about 100,000 times but nearly all flash memory devices have specialized circuitry to write to different locations each time the memory is access to even out the wear on all cells. So in theory you can write 200 TB of data on a 2 GB sd card before it fails. This may not be so in practice, but let’s halve it to 100 TB. How much time do you think your computer is gonna take to wear out your card completely? Well that depends on your computers swappiness, but I seriously think it is going to take about a year.

Another protest against the flash swap is the speed of flash devices. While flash devices are much slower than hard drives, think about this scenario: Your computer is playing back a high definition video file and using all its ram, and your hard drive just can keep up with reading the media from the drive. What happens when a cron job executes and needs some memory? Some pages need to be swapped to your hard drive which is on the same device but on a different partition. Your drive head will jump there to write the page, and jump back immediately to reading the media potentially skipping frames on decoding. Using another harddrive to hold the swap file would fix this problem but what if you can’t? What if you are a cheapskates like me? Using a flash memory device for swap would free your hard drive, and even though it is slower, the fact that it uses another media to read from and another bus to move the data makes for shorter I/O queues on devices and faster access times.

So while it may not be as good as upgrading your RAM, putting in a second hard drive for swap or buying a faster hard drive; it still makes a difference in systems where hard drive I/O is the bottleneck. If this applies to you, go on and make a swap partition on that old flash drive (just make sure it is not USB 1.1). It is a very cheap performance upgrade you can use for a year. And who knows what you will be using one year from now anyway?

• There is no battery indicator
• You can't watch the CPU temperature
• and you can't set the CPU frequency governor

Of course you can use gkrellm for the first two but it does not play nicely with dynamic window managers like wmii. If I wanted to drag windows around I'd use Gnome, thank you. It is much nicer to change the right side of the status bar to show current temperature and battery status. 

Beware! This change is for the sh script version of wmiirc. If you are using the other version this may not work.

In file: ~/.wmii-3.5/wmiirc change the part that says

# Status Bar Info
status() {
        echo -n $(uptime | sed 's/.*://; s/,//g') '|' $(date)
}

to

# Status Bar Info
status() {
	BAT=`acpi -b`
	LEFT=`echo $BAT | cut -d ',' -f 2`
	TEMP=`acpi -t -B -c | cut -d ',' -f 2 | cut -d "." -f 1`
	LOAD=$(uptime | sed 's/.*://; s/,//g')
	DATE=`date +"%d/%m/%y %R:%S"`
	echo -n T: $TEMP '|' B: $LEFT '|' $LOAD '|' $DATE
}

You can of course keep the longer date format by changing "$DATE" to $(date) but I like it shorter.

Now on to the Frequency Governor! You can download the script below and put it in ~/.wmii-3.5 . Don't forget to make it executable.

cpufreq @ SymbolEngine

Now when you run the cpufreq action you will be asked for your password. This is because CPU governor can only be changed by root user. After that you'll get a nice dmenu on top of the screen to choose a governor.

I hope you find these scripts useful.

1. Go to settings/system menu on your GP2x
2. Make sure the IP Address is 10.1.0.1
3. Turn on telnet, ftp, samba and web servers (You wont need samba if you are using a real operating system)

If you are running Linux:

1. ifconfig usb0 up 10.1.0.2
2. now you should be able to ping the device with:
   ping 10.1.0.1

If you are running m$ windows (Who said windows is easier to manage?):

1. You will probably need USB Gadget driver for windows. Most flavors come without it. Download and install:
   Download USB Gadget Driver for Windows @ M$
2. Turn on your GP2x. A baloon will pop up (don't you hate them?) to say connection is established. 
3. Go to Control Panel -> Network Connections.
4. Open TCP/IP properties of "Linux USB Ethernet / RNDIS
5. Manually configure it with an IP of "10.1.0.2" and a subnet mask of "255.0.0.0"
6. You should be now able ping your device from command shell with:
   ping 10.1.0.1

Now you can also telnet to your GP2x, transfer files with samba (means: windows file sharing) or ftp.

There is also a pretty complete web server with even PHP installed running there. PHP I tell ya! Have fun!