You guys have been very helpful. Thank you very much for your time.
After a bit more research, I have made the decision to exchange the venerable
TS-7200, and buy the TS-7553 with case and a few MicroSD cards. This actually
solves quite a few of our problems all in one fell-swoop. It has the 2.6
kernel installed already (running Debian Lenny), more RAM, and comes without
all the fluff (expansion options) we don't really need. Oddly enough, it's
also marginally cheaper. I'm sure I'll be back here in the weeks to come for
more advice, and with a bit more experience maybe I'll too have some pointers
for the masses.
Again, what a great platform this is! :O)
Dan
--- In "g_martino" <> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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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