Re: (native) debian(-installer) support for fsg-3
Holger Levsen schrieb:
Hi Rod, hi Tomasz,
Martin Michlmayr (and your work!) told me to contact you, to work on getting
debian-installer support for the Freecom FSG-3. Kudos and thanks for your
great work so far!
I'm a Debian developer and have in the past contributed to d-i (nowadays more
to Debian Edu, DebConf video,..), a owner of a fsg-3 since today (which is
the 4th arch of mine running Debian and the 7th which can run Debian ;) and
very busy with lots of other stuff "unfortunatly" too.
Anyway... (I haven't even yet tried Tomasz' excellent howto, but I've looked
around a bit.)
It seems the first thing we need is kernel support. Doh. :) The patch from Rod
(latest I found was
http://marc.info/?l=linux-arm-kernel&m=120183326106518&w=2 - is there some
newer, cleaner? a branch/repo/patch to pull?) which is not included in the
2.6.25~rc6 snapshot of the debian kernels and therefore I assume will also
not be included upstream. What's the status on this? Waiting for .25 and
after that re-submitting everything?
So it seems for now, we (I) will have to build our/my own arm kernel packages,
so that we then can build kernel udebs to create an arm d-i image, which we
eventually will be able to boot by pressing the reset button and serving it
via bootp.... but first we need the kernel.
Is there anything else we need in userland (or other kernel patches) which
isnt in lenny already?
And we will need to come up with a reliable way to write the kernel to flash
and configure redboot. BTW, is redboot the only option or could we also use
uboot or any other bootloader?
Using RedBoot and not replacing it with any other bootloader is by far
the safest way to flash FSG-3.
Even if you screw kernel flashing, you can still relatively easily
recover using a serial cable (the device needs to be opened though,
which means the warranty is gone).
If something goes wrong when you flash a new bootloader over RedBoot -
well, good luck (there is JTAG, but it's not for mere mortals I guess).
A nice thing on kernel-userland border is adding a custom initramfs: if
your system goes for a lunch and doesn't boot anymore (because the user
just did rm -rf /etc), one can always boot by simply inserting a
"recovery USB-stick". Basically, when kernel boots and executes
initramfs, it checks if a "recovery USB-stick" is connected, and if it
is, the system boots from there.
It would be nice to have such an option for other devices with no
keyboard, monitor etc., where Debian installer runs, not just for FSG-3.
--
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org
Reply to: