I've fixed a few things to do with my HP laptop [0] which has made it a
lot easier to work on the Emdebian root filesystem for ARM.
Current Emdebian SVN now includes two large changesets:
1. The package split.
2. Support for a bootable (but imperfect) root filesystem.
1. The package split
====================
$ dpkg -l '*emdebian*'
ii emdebian-archive-keyring 0.8.4 GnuPG archive keys for the emdebian repository
ii emdebian-rootfs 0.8.4 emdebian root filesystem support
ii emdebian-tools 0.8.4 emdebian crossbuilding tool set
ii libemdebian-tools-perl 0.8.4 emdebian support library
The dependencies are laid out as follows:
emdebian-archive-keyring depends only on apt and gnupg
libemdebian-tools-perl brings in the most useful perl modules
emdebian-rootfs is a mixture of perl and shell and brings in
dependencies required to work with the prebuilt binary packages for ARM
but not to build new or updated ones.
emdebian-tools depends on all the others and includes the scripts to
actually build packages.
v0.8.4 will be uploaded to Emdebian tonight.
v0.9.0 will be identical and uploaded to Debian tonight but will spend
time in the NEW queue.
Any updates of 0.8.4 will be uploaded to Emdebian until 0.9.0 leaves
NEW, at which point 0.9.1 will be uploaded to Emdebian.
There may be a 0.10.x series, depending on whether I need to fix any
issues within Debian before I can release 1.0.0.
[0] http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/serendipity/index.php?/archives/93-Serial-over-USB,-broken-laptops-and-screen.html
2. Bootable root filesystem
===========================
Necessarily, only tested on balloon3 so far and it is far from perfect,
but, it does boot with Linux balloon 2.6.22.2-pxa270 #2 Thu Feb 21
10:52:05 GMT 2008 armv5tel unknown and associated modules. (Remember to
install the kernel modules after installing the root filesystem even if
the kernel has not changed.)
Remaining issues are:
a) fix empbuilderlib to create usable init symlinks and get them
running on boot. (e.g. to load modules and mount all entries)
b) fix network setup - missing device even with modules modprobed ??
c) Continue development of the GUI root filesystem (updated kernel)
d) create first-boot support for 'depmod'.
e) Add support for automating handling of approximate system time via a
file created by emsandbox: /datestring that contains a date string that
can be passed directly to the busybox version of 'date -s'. (Not the
file, the string in the file - so use cat and then feed that variable to
date -s.) The reason for this is so that devices can be installed
without any network access yet have a vaguely recent system time so
that things like gpg work properly. (Anything in the last few years is
OK.) f) fix balloon3-config to use a sensible /etc/inittab
and /etc/init.d/rcS that work with busybox instead of the current one
that wants runlevels and therefore sysvinit.
g) Fix the initscripts package (and a few others) in Emdebian to not
expect runlevels seeing as busybox cannot provide them anyway. There
should be no need for /etc/rc2.d/ etc.
Installation steps are:
(differs from the normal balloon3 setup in running ./emsecondstage)
echo "installing rootfs (may take a while)"
cd /mnt/root
tar xvzf /mnt/${DRIVE}/${DIR}/debianroot.tgz
echo "final stage configuration"
./emsecondstage
i.e. all you need to do is unpack the tarball created by emsandbox to
the destination directory, change to that directory and then
run ./emsecondstage which sets up cdebconf, ldconfig and dpkg --configure -a.
Once done, reboot, login, run depmod and handle the datestring.
(Currently, you should also start selected init scripts like
module-init-tools, urandom, udev and network.)
Boards other than balloon3 will need custom package or machine:variant
support to get their configuration working. Take a look at the
balloon3-config package currently in Emdebian.
--
Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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