Re: uboot & bootable USB on t5325
* David Burgess <apt.get@gmail.com> [2010-05-10 15:45]:
> Ultimately I would like to have these netbooting ltsp via tftp or
> some other means. Failing that, a debian install to the embedded
> flash would also be handy.
> Using HP's included ThinState utility I have created a bootable USB
> stick that uses a script to write a gzipped image to the embedded
> flash using dd. I'm wondering about the prospect of replacing that
> image with something debian-like, preferably something that could be
> configured to pull my ltsp image over the network.
I see two options:
1) You modify the u-boot environment to load an image via TFTP.
2) As you say, you use the USB recovery mechanism to replace the OS
with Debian.
Both should work. However, you'll need a serial console for at least
one of your devices for your experiments because it will be impossible
to debug otherwise when something goes wrong (and it always does :).
If you go with 2), you could create an ARM system with debootstrap
(e.g. in qemu) and then customize it any way you want.
One problem is that the kernel in Debian doesn't support the t5325 at
all. That's something I'll be working on, but there will still be
issues with audio and VGA. Both of these are currently not supported
in the mainline kernel and it may take some time for this to happen.
However, for what you need, I think you could simply stay with the
kernel HP supplies.
For 1) while loading something via TFTP would work fine, I'm not sure
what you'd load. Can you explain some more how LTSP works exactly?
In any case, creating a custom Debian ARM image and replacing the OS
shouldn't be too much work. But a serial console will come in very
handy in case it doesn't boot the first time.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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