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Re: Woody base-install, reboot - no inittab...



Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 03:36:55PM +0200, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:

I'm trying to install woody (3.0r1) on an ARM platform, it is all mostly hackish, own kernel, I just want to set up a "proper" complete Linux distro for ARM with a compiler, package-management, etc., something a bit more than busybox. So, I booted my kernel with an NFS-mounted boot-"floppy", the installer started, I managed after several attempts to go through the base-installation, either installing on an NFS mount, or on a local CF (no PCMCIA). I also performed the "kernel-install" (of course, I am not going to use that kernel, just to satisfy the installer), and "make system bootable", because I hoped that then the system will really become complete and ready for the reboot and further installation - but alas. /etc/inittab and all contents of /etc/rc* is missing. I found one more post on the internet about the same problem, and no suitable reply. I could get some scripts from somewhere, the problem is - I don't want to just boot this system, I want the 2 stage installer to start, then choose packages, etc. - the usual thing. Well, I can now boot into the shell, shall I just start the 2nd stage manually from there?


Well my experience getting debian onto an arm system it didn't support
was like this:

Install the linux image the vendor provides.
Copy over debian's debootstrap scripts
run debootstrap into a new dir to setup a debian filesystem.
Do whatever platform needs to make system bootable with a kernel (don't
expect debian to ever know how to boot your platform if you don't tell
it, since it isn't an already supported platform.)

You still have to fix fstab and such yourself, but at least rc#.d and
such will be in order.  If your platform needs a special kernel, just
use that however it wants to boot, and make sure to install the kernel
modules in the right place (if it has any modules).

Len Sorensen


Is there any particular reason you're installing Woody? I've found that the latest release candidate of the debian-installer for Sarge is vastly improved, especially on platforms that it doesn't explicitly know about.

It only complains that it doesn't have a kernel package for my system, but that's OK, since I can give my bootloader a proper kernel without touching the debian system.

I started with the netwinder ramdisk (http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-arm/rc3/images/netwinder/netboot/initrd.gz)

added static device nodes since I'm using a kernel without devfs support, made it a little larger (actually, made a new, larger ext2 image and tar'ed everythin over) so it has more free space to download temporary files, and it works great.

-Josh

--

Joshua Malone                            Linux Engineer
Applied Data Systems                www.applieddata.net
434-244-9504                    jmalone@applieddata.net



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