Re: EmDebian on Debian Etch - A Step-By-Step Guide
Hello Neil,
Greetings!
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
Ok.
> 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?
Maybe up to 512MB of flash storage space.
> 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.
I am not entirely planning to target a real embedded appliance. I just
want to have a stripped down Debian (hopefully Etch because it's the
stable branch) especially without the docs, etc. and a read-only
filesystem. The target machine that I am planning is a standard AMD64
box, either a clone PC or a branded one.
> 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.
Yes, I found the emdebian-tools at the Unstable branch but I also
found one at the EmDebian site. I am confused which one to use and
what is really the right way to do what I want to accomplish.
> 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.
I don't have any idea about the Debian EeePC port. As much as
possible, I just want to have a normal/standard Debian Etch AMD64
install on my target system minus the docs, etc. and make it a
read-only filesystem. It's not really an embedded appliance.
> 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.
I don't need X at all.
> 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.)
Any URL for Grip? I want to read their documentations.
> 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
Ok. Thank you.
> 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.
Ok.
Thank you very much for giving your time to answer my questions.
Regards,
GNUbie
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