Help supporting Debian on a Kurobox
Dear people,
Thanks to Charles Plessy, I have now a new PowerPC based machine, which is
a Kuro Box [*], an embedded system/NAS with a Linux kernel and a kind of
stripped down RH-like system (no compilers, no chroot, no NFS server etc).
I obviously want to run Debian on it so that I downloaded the powerpc
basedebs.tar from woody, a statically linked busybox (for chroot), unpacked
and manually installed these packages, upgraded to sarge and now to etch.
This system image is already tarred and available for others to see, if
necessary.
Unfortunately, things are not that easy, since there are two main
obstacles:
* the kernel available on the firmware is a kernel 2.4.17 and the libc6
from lenny requires a 2.6 kernel for the NTPL support. It seems to be
possible to upgrade the kernel to 2.6, but not as trivial as with a
PowerMac (and I'm used to both OldWorld and NewWorld PowerMacs).
* There seems to be some daemons (heartbeat daemons) and utilities that
need special attention (read: packaging) and that are not yet available
in Debian (or outdated), together with corresponding initscripts.
Since this is my first incursion into the embedded arena, I would welcome
any help (and, BTW, learn and collaborate with the emdebian project with my
own packages).
It seems to me that a special kernel should be compiled, that special
devices should be created (apparently, the current udev/kernels don't
create the necessary devices needed so that the device doesn't shuts down
automatically) and that some daemons specific to the kurobox (and variants)
should be packaged.
Well, that's it. If someone can help here, it would be wonderful. I plan on
documenting what I do so that others can benefit from an easy/standard
Debian install.
Thanks in advance for any help, Rogério Brito.
P.S.: One of the necessary daemons seems to be at
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/ppc-evtd/>, with a GPL license.
P.S.2: I'm not currently subscribed to debian-devel. I would appreciate
being Cc'ed.
[*] http://penguinppc.org/embedded/kuro/
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org
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