On Wed, 4 Feb 2009 10:58:34 +0100 "Hoefle Marco" <Marco.Hoefle@nanotronic.ch> wrote: > Hello Neil, > I filed a bug against the webpage: > Bug#514101: Acknowledgement of maintainer-only report (buildd.emdebian.org confusing repositories) Got it, thanks. > I might have confused you in what I am doing and what I want to do, > sorry about that. It's partially our fault for not making the website clearer. The website does need to be made more helpful for new users, any other issues that you find confusing, please file additional bugs. > I am running emdebian-tools on a powerful pc which > has debian lenny installed, so not on the actual target board. On this > machine I think the emdebian-tool installation is correct now and > emsetup works as well. Ah, good. > What I want to do is to get an emdebian demo running on a XScale PXA270 > board running which has 64MByte Ram and 32MByte flash. OK, I'm presuming that this board doesn't have a screen - what kind of tasks / services do you want the board to provide once Emdebian Crush is installed? > On that board > currently linux > from Elinos (an embedded linux distributor) is running and I want to > replace that. The linux kernel and the Elinos root filesystem is > brought up by the boot loader uboot. > So my question was if it is possible to replace the filesystem from > elinos with that from emdebian I generated (the emdebian-arm.tgz) and > to use the kernel already installed. Safeguard the kernel modules first. Find out where the modules are installed, collect them into a .tar.gz and put that tarball alongside your emdebian-arm.tgz. I think you said that the kernel is on a different part of the filesystem - as long as you can clear the storage occupied by Elinos without removing the kernel then you can use that kernel. If not, you'll need a way of either copying the current kernel to your main machine and replacing it or a new kernel and installation support. I can't really be that much help with the specifics because each board is so different. Hopefully some of the hardware experts on this list will be more help. All I can offer is: http://balloonboard.org/balloonwiki/BalloonSoftwareLoading It's the only board that I have and the one I use to develop Emdebian Crush. > If it is not possible that easily imagine I would have a new empty > device without anything. What would be the procedure to get emdebian > running? As long as the bootloader gives you a "development" mode where you have a basic shell, access to utilities like mount, chroot etc., it should be usable but each combination of bootloader and board is likely to need bespoke scripting to actually do the installation. buildroot provides a setup shell script that I use to actually install emdebian: http://www.balloonboard.org/lurker/message/20070712.172539.f3b9415a.ja.html (Can't find the actual file online right now but the basic stage is to clear the relevant partition, decompress the emdebian-arm.tgz tarball, run ./emsecondstage, decompress the modules.tgz and reboot.) But take a look at these files too: http://balloonboard.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/balloon/trunk/rootfs/debian/balloon3-config/files/ Wookey prepares a balloon3-config package from these. That config package is then included into the emdebian-arm.tgz using machine:variant support in emsandbox. The package provides a usable inittab, fstab, modules list and a postinst maintainer script: http://balloonboard.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/balloon/trunk/rootfs/debian/balloon3-config/debian/postinst?rev=263&view=markup These kind of board-specific config routines are needed to get the board to boot successfully, but each routine is specific to one kind of board. Hopefully, the working balloon implementation can act as a guide for your board. One of the reasons to release Emdebian Crush 1.0 alongside Lenny is to get things like this standardised - to work out what works only for the balloon and what works for other boards too. Feel free to use the Debian Wiki to make notes of your progress: http://wiki.debian.org/Embedded_Debian Add a link to a new page in http://wiki.debian.org/EmdebianExamples and click the link to create that page. I'm hoping to get things like this folded into the normal Debian Installer for the next Debian release - the more information you can provide, the easier it will be to standardise the support before taking it to D-I. > I suppose first we need a bootloader installed on the flash, which one would you recommend? Hopefully Wookey will jump in here and take over - I'm OK on the software side but hardware and bootloaders are still difficult for me too. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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