On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 14:50 +0800, GNUbie wrote: > > There is no Emdebian support in Etch. > > My laptop is running Debian Etch AMD64 right now. So what distribution > do you suggest? For your laptop: Debian Lenny AMD64. Change your /etc/apt/sources.list to refer to either 'lenny' or 'testing' and then do the normal 'apt-get update', 'apt-get dist-upgrade' or use aptitude in the same manner. You can upgrade to sid as well if you want to but sid is the name for Debian unstable and it will get fairly unstable immediately after a release. > That is what I want to achieve, to reduce the installation size to my > target machine (which is not my laptop). My target machine to install > a stripped down GNU/Linux (hopefully it will be EmDebian) may be an > AMD64 on a mini-ITX motherboard. I am planning to use a Disk-On-Module > IDE flash to store the system. OK, from your original message, it sounded as if you wanted Emdebian on a machine already running Debian Etch. How much flash storage space are you going to give the new system? What is your target installation size? Is there a reason why you are using an amd64 chip rather than an i386 or ARM? - the amd64 will be quite power hungry so it sounds as if you are building a small system that is expecting to do a lot of computational work. How much RAM will you be giving the new system? It doesn't sound particularly portable and you may need a noisy fan. (Unless there is a low power amd64 chip I didn't know about). Given that, I'm still not sure why you've chosen to create this system. Understanding what the system is designed to do is the key to helping you with the flavour of the OS. > > Generally, laptops != embedded. Even netbooks like the Eee and Aspire1 > > can run Debian. Support for a slightly slimmer Debian for such devices > > will not exist in Debian or Emdebian until after the Lenny release. > > Yes, I know that. Maybe you misunderstood my previous statement. Yes, I did. It's clearer now. > The > build machine that I will be using is my AMD64 laptop and prepare the > EmDebian system on that same machine. Once I'm done creating the > stripped down Debian or EmDebian on my AMD64 laptop, I will then > transfer it to the target machine which might be an AMD64 machine on a > mini-ITX motherboard. Hmmm, not sure you need to do it that way around. You can keep the laptop running a full Debian install and then use a chroot to test the new system. emdebian-tools includes tools to create suitable chroots and to build packages within them. However, unless you are thinking of giving this board less than 500Mb of flash storage space, I'm not sure you need to build any packages. > > So which? i386 or amd64? If it is the laptop, please give more > > information on what resources are available on the laptop and why you > > think it needs Emdebian. If it is some other machine, note that there > > are only packages available for ARM right now. Outline support for i386 > > (Eee PC, Aspire1 etc.) is pending as is mips and mipsel support. > > I am targeting an AMD64 machine but not my laptop. If there is no > EmDebian packages for AMD64, what do you recommend then? Please > advice. I think you are doing a similar kind of task to the Debian Eee PC port (which includes the Acer Aspire1) in that you want Debian with xfce and a few custom tweaks to fit the system into 2Gb or so. You don't need Emdebian to do that. If you do not want a graphic interface on the new system, you can do without X and xfce etc. so you could still use Debian. Depending on which packages you need, you would need anything from 300Mb to 1Gb for this. If you want a graphic interface but still want an installed size about 800Mb to 1Gb, you will be looking at Emdebian Grip which is in consideration at this time and has a little bit of scripting support but no testing. (No figures exist for just how small Emdebian Grip will be.) If you want a graphic interface in less than 100Mb of flash, you need to rebuild all the current Emdebian ARM packages for amd64 using emdebian-tools (native build), create a local test mirror and build a root filesystem using emsandbox. This is the current Emdebian package set - as used for the Balloon3 board and currently only built for ARM. http://www.emdebian.org/emdebian/flavours.html > By the way, I came across the Slind website. What is the difference > between Slind to EmDebian? Methodology - The Emdebian 'composite' method supports folding all our changes directly into Debian and only using patches for the interim period. We also keep in sync with Debian across each distribution and rely on Debian support for the cross-dependency packages. This way, it is easier to provide updated packages with bug fixes from Debian. Slind modified Debian packages and ran them as forks. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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