On Sat, 2008-03-29 at 19:54 -0700, PatM wrote: > Actually, I was being rather brain-dead .I've had a nasty case of > bronchitis for the last week and its hard to concentrate for more than > 15 minutes at a time or even see cleary after an hour). You are also in the unfortunate position that nobody tends to be awake when you want answers over IRC. There doesn't appear to be anyone in a suitable timezone - if you can, please stay on IRC so that we can at least post answers that you can read on scrollback later. I missed you by only a few hours today. > Probably not the > wisest time to try and learn a new OS .The last time I ran Linux it was > redhat 7 and I was limited to apache, postgres, and php. You really do need to know about Debian (rather than RH) before doing much with Emdebian - we aren't (yet) at the stage. > I don't need to run emchain at all! Somehow I got the mistaken > impression that I had to build the toolchain when, in fact, emsetup had > already installed what I needed. I spent the better of three days (at > least the parts where I was actually awake) installing and uninstalling > linux and emdebian for no reason other than foggy-brain-itis (noob > linux'ers syndrome). Its not all a waste though as I learned a LOT in > the process. I'll add a check to emchain so that if the toolchains are already installed, it tells you not to bother trying to build them. Your IRC question: > [05:32] --> pat_ (~pat@S010600119503295d.vs.shawcable.net) has joined #emdebian > <pat_> I have a completely stupid question... I managed to compile a > kernel and modules and get emdebian-tools to create a nice .tgz file. > How do I get from here to an initramfs file? > I've been all over the emdebian man pages, website, and wiki and > can't seem to find any hint at all. > A pointer to a how-to would be great, or perhaps a nudge by stating > the totally obvious point that I'm missing. > [07:05] <-- pat_ has quit (Remote host closed the connection) (now [09:12]) The reason there are no docs is, umm, we haven't done an initramfs yet. :-) So far, Emdebian has only booted on a balloon3 board - it is as far as we have got. It's all yet to be done. Unfortunately, you are on your own at that stage and the solution depends entirely on your hardware. I am looking at weaving emsandbox into the Debian installer but as I've only managed to get a bootable root filesystem in the last few weeks, there hasn't been time. On my test hardware, I would: 1. Boot the device into a development environment (you may have something similar as an option from the bootloader). You need some way of interacting with the device during the install. In the long term, this would be the role of D-I but it needs a lot of work. 2. in your serial console, install the kernel as you would normally. 3. Decompress the emsandbox tarball directly onto the filesystem of the device - e.g. via a USB key - into the directory that will become the / of the device. cd to that directory. Run ./emsecondstage. 4. Install the kernel modules over that. 5. reboot. http://balloonboard.org/balloonwiki/BalloonSoftwareLoading That page is specific to this one device but it does show how it can be done. Whether any of that is useful to your own device, I just don't know at this stage but it might give you some clues. Hopefully this summer, the various conferences and work sessions will allow Emdebian to get to the stage where we can actually "launch" something called Emdebian Lenny (!) with something approaching an installer, even if it only supports a very small range of devices at that stage. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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