HI I just succeeded in installing ARM-Debian on 2GB SD card on TomTom GO 720
>From that, any package in debian is availabe and will work, including web browsers, X11, compilers editors anything The trickiest part is you need to modify kernel config to include reiserfs filesystem, swap support and FPU emulation Reiserfs (or some other unix-grade efficient fs) is needed because Debian needs symlinks priviledges that vfat doesn't provide FPU is needed because many debian's binaries are not compiled as soft-float in the library but expect FPU, either hardware or emulated by kernel. Swap is needed because 64MB can be short sometimes, I gave it 128MB swap recompile new kernel using original source and the cross compiler extract original ttsystem, replace it's kernel with the compiled one and installation of Debian can proceeed... All the tools are on opentom website and the kernel source can be downloaded from tomtom directly. Currently original ttn application is needed to setup bluetooth and networking but probably someone of you will find a way to setup this from Debian and call ttn as an application from ... Anyway, here are my step-by-step notes that got me up to the point that I can ssh to Debian inside a TomTom: 0. on tomtom, prepare opentom bluetooth console tools and setup on PC bluetooth networking server (dund), chack that you can login to tomtom and that utilites like editor and screen work. Also check that bluetooth console is working (serial login to tomtom over rfcomm) 1. compile new tomtom kernel with added reiserfs, swap and FPU kernel support, (compile them not as modules but in the kernel [*]) use original kernel sources and original cross-compiler tools 2. from opentom website get the tools to extract original ttsystem file replece kernel with newly compiled arch/arm/boot/zImage and repack extracted cpio.z archive with the new kernel into new ttsystem file copy it in tomtom (rename old ttsystem) 3. with cfdisk create linux partition on tomtom's SD card (I used 2GB, one partition on the whole card). 4. create reiserfs on the sdcard with mkfs.reiserfs Optionally now you can try immediately point 6. and verify that everything works 5. make first stage debootstrap on the PC /tmp and copy it to the sdcard debootstrap --verbose --foreign --arch arm lenny /tmp/sdcard http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian The foreign option halts the debootstrap process before the chroot (foreign means it's building for another host system). 6. login to tomtom, start screen. mount the sdcard reiserfs to /mnt/movinand (if it had vfat, sdcard would be mounted automatically to /mnd/movinand) mount -o noatime /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/movinand if you come so far, the rest is easy 7. from tomtom's shell (busybox) mount proc and devpts filesystems (you can do it even though they are already mounted) mount -t proc none /mnt/movinand/proc mount -t devpts none /mnt/movinand/dev/pts during installation phase check that they are still mounted, if not mount them again. Typically rm -rf fails if there's no /proc mounted and some packages won't install without /dev/pts 8. edit script debootstrap/functions and replace line: in_target mount -t proc proc /proc with this: in_target_nofail mount -t proc proc /proc because mounting /proc command will fail, but we have mounted it already by other means 9. finish debian's second stage (this takes time, maybe half an hour) keep tomtom awake by pinging it each 15 seconds ping -i 15 192.168.72.1 and tapping on the next screen every now and then (otherwise it would enter suspend state and loose network connection) add some path probably that's missing export PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin chroot /mnt/movinand you should get shell prompt now like sh-3.2# /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage If debootstrap succeeds, the last line it prints will be: I: Base system installed successfully congratulations 10. follow instructions http://emqbit.com/deboostrap-debian on how to setup system (hostname, passwords, etc) Best regards, Davor Emard
