Hi all,
I helped Roberto to prepare the board with Debian Etch + kernel 2.6.34.
He asked me to take part in this thread to explain how we did it.
But - before downloading the packages - some warnings.
We know, Etch is old. In fact, it is the old-stable, no more support from
upstream. You get all packages from the archive.
In the future we should be able to get a working Debian squeeze, but for now i
strongly encourage to NOT upgrade.
After Debian Etch, the arm architecture was deprecated in favour of armel,
which uses only EABI, no more OABI.
You can't use TS precompiled kernel / modules with Debian Lenny and later
because they are OABI.
If you want to try to get a Lenny, Squeeze or Sid you should bootstrap one from
scratch.
Now I try to answer to your questions:
1- why ext3?
Well, we started first with ext2, and it was good, but every time we
rebooted... fsck!
So we started searching some SD-friendly fs, we were interested in yaffs, jffs,
jffs2... but i found this article:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/FileSystem_microSD_cards
We decided at last to stick with ext3 and mount everything ro (if possible) and
put in tmpfs /tmp/, /var/tmp and likewise.
Pay attention to NOT mount /etc read-only, or on another mount point. Bad
things will happen (/etc/mtab, for example).
2-making ramdisks
With 2.6 kernel you can use the powerful feature of tmpfs.
While a ramdisk will eat all memory you give him, tmpfs use just the space
needed by his content.
You can try it with this simple command:
mount -t tmpfs /mnt -o SIZE=50M
This will mount /mnt with 50MB of free space.
NOTE: tmpfs will use swap space, if there isn't enough ram.
3- flashing kernel
I found some references across the web, anyway i wrote a mass-flashing script,
very useful if you have a lot of boards. It needs only minicom and a webserver.
Roberto, can you put it online?
If you prefer to get your hands dirty, i can try to merge all our notes about
installing Debian and configuring the kernel in my spare time.
Sorry for my bad english.
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