[iPAQ] debian-arm success

I've just finished setting up a debian-arm system over NFS on the
iPAQ, based on Jim Pick's Netwinder debian-arm starter image. The
process is fairly straightforward.. first, get Jim's image from
http://jimpick.com/pub/debian/arm/image/ and untar it on a box that
will be the server. Make sure you untar as root, so that the proper
owners and permissions can be set. Then, export that directory over
NFS -- make sure you give the no_root_squash option in the export
line.

On the iPAQ, mount that directory somewhere, /skiff works. I'd
suggest using soft,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 as the mount options -- the
8k block sizes help transfers, and it's a little unclear as to what
the defaults are. If you get RPC errors, unmount, and remount with
'nolock' -- you either have to have a working lockd setup, or no
locking at all, otherwise things will fail that try to lock. One thing
you should also do now is set the ipaq's clock (using date), since it
seems to start at 0. :-)

Now chroot to this new directory. chroot is available on the nfs you
just mounted -- '/skiff/usr/sbin/chroot /skiff' should do it. Do ls
/. You should see things like /Image and stuff which aren't on your
iPAQ / image. Great! Now, mount proc -- 'mount -t proc /proc
/proc'. Now edit /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out all the lines
and add:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian potato main contrib non-free

[Note to veteran debian users: do NOT use unstable. unstable in arm
doesn't quite mean the same thing as it does in x86 -- it means that
not only are packages bleeding edge, but 75% of the time they won't
even install correctly. Save yourself some grief. :-) ]. Now, you will
have to update apt by hand -- the version that's on the image is old,
and will segfault when you try to do anything. Grab
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/binary-arm/base/apt_0.3.19.deb
and put it somewhere within the nfs tree (/tmp works great). [Note
that you can do this on either the iPAQ or the server, doesn't
matter.] Then, on the ipaq, cd into /tmp or wherever, and type 'dpkg
-i apt_0.3.19.deb'. Now, with a working apt, you can type
'apt-get update' and then 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. It will churn for
a while, then have you download a bunch of packages, then churn for a
while more. When it's done, you'll have a very minimal, but
up-to-date, debian-arm system.

The next thing to do is install useful packages -- task-c-dev is a
good one. The one major issue is that the X packages there are still
3.3.6 -- I'm going to see if I can somehow cobble in the 4.0 bits
(install 3.3.6, build 4.0 from the CVS source, and install on top of
it). (If you're not familiar with debian, you can use dselect, or read
the apt-get and apt-cache man pages.)

Even with a ton of stuff installed (i.e. full GNOME and X, plus
development), it's still under 300MB -- make sure you run 'apt-get
clean' when you're done getting stuff to get rid of the downloaded
.debs.

Now to set up nfsroot (first to find out how to get rid of 512k kernel
limit...)..

        - Vlad
Received on Fri Sep 15 00:23:49 2000