Le samedi 20 mars 2010 à 18:03 +0100, "Steffen Möller" a écrit : 
> Hi Thibaut,
> 
> > Von: Thibaut GIRKA <[email protected]>
> > I am a French student, Debian user, Neo FreeRunner owner, and I'm really
> > interested in porting the Debian Installer to the FreeRunner (on which
> > I've installed Debian manually, although SHR unstable is my main OS).
> 
> this is good news! You are the first to speak out his interest.
>  
> > Although I don't know much about d-i yet, I use Debian daily on several
> > machines, and I am maintaining a Debian package: bluemindo.
> > By the way, I've built custom Debian CD images and PXE boot images using
> > live-helper, and knows what an initial ram disk or a kernel is.
> > I also have skills in C and Python, and I have some experience in
> > contributing to FLOSS projects.
> 
> All fine with me. Concerning mentoring, my concern is that you have deserved 
> a better mentor than me sine I have no experience with d-i either. But your 
> English is fine, so I am very confident you can communicate your questions 
> easily. Also, the d-i hard core groups are not too far away from you in 
> physical terms, you can even spend some time there, I presume.

Thanks :)
What do you mean by "not too far away from you in physical terms"?

> > Regarding the FreeRunner, I've got one since the beginning of the year,
> > and I use it as my sole phone.
> Ok, I write emails, then.
> 
> > I have flashed SHR unstable on the NAND, and I've manually (reading the
> > so-called install.sh script) installed Debian on a µSD card, although I
> > rarely use it.
> 
> You can certainly ask yourself why you are preferring something else than 
> Debian.

Yeah, I mainly use my FR as a phone, and Debian is lacking good
telephony apps at the moment, that's all.

> > I haven't tried d-i on the FreeRunner yet, but I think the main
> > issues/things to do would be:
> > * Starting d-i. I can see two ways of doing it:
> >   - Putting it on a µSD card, maybe not the easiest thing if there's
> > already something on it.
> 
> As a _start_ I suggest to run d-i as a direct substitute to install.sh . If 
> this is not possible, well, maybe I would even go for an emulated environment 
> on your desktop from which you can then write to an SD directly which would 
> then boot your phone.

> >   - Using kexec on a host system to run d-i without altering the
> > partition table beforehand.
> > * Using the kernel from pkg-fso
> > * Hacking g-i to work with the touchscreen and
> > provide an on-screen keyboard.
> >   As far as I know, directfb is being dropped in favor of X11, so, it
> > shouldn't be that much of an issue.
> 
> Right, go for the simplest variant that is possible.
> 
> > * Including all those things in a fairly lightweight initrd.
> 
> Well, how do you get the initrd to boot? On an SD from where to write to the 
> Flash? It would be nice if the phone could boot from USB or if it could find 
> a boot image and kernel from the net.

Hm, I wasn't targeting the NAND, but the µSD. Since the kernel and
initrd are loaded in the RAM, no need to keep the partition on which
they were put in order for U-Boot/Qi to load them.

I would be interested in USB booting aswell, but I didn't find anything
about it.
We could use dfu-util to push the kernel into the RAM, but according to
the manpage, we can only transfer up to 2MB that way...

> Until you get a more competent mentor, your mentor suggest to aim as low as 
> possible, which usually is more complicated than one thinks in the first 
> place. And you can then add to that minimal plan as much as you can achieve.
> 
> The minimal plan (IMHO) is to produce an SD that a regular user can put into 
> the device and boot from. If you say that you want to produce the device with 
> the OpenMoko and that you have a good idea how this will work, fine. My hunch 
> is, though, that it will be much easier to achieve with a virtual machine 
> that has access to the SD. You will be sufficiently busy to set this up 
> (newer kernels make problems with ARM QEMU on amd64, at least for me) and 
> then there is enough to change to have d-i ask the right questions and 
> generally for to it what is in install.sh .  Once you have set this all up, 
> then I suggest to prepare a Debian package that automates your setup, allows 
> the user to push an SD into their desktop's slot and prepare the image with 
> the d-i.
> 
> If you want to do it differently, then this is just fine with me, really.

Well, yeah, my initial goal was to have d-i running on the Freerunner,
but the QEMU approach would be a good start.

> Also, I expect some other readers of this list to be not really happy with 
> what I was proposing here, preferring just something that works from SHR or 
> whatever boots the device, directly.  So, dear all, speak out, maybe the 
> perfect mentor is crystallizing from this now pending discussion .... or 
> Thibaut will just be community-mentored :)

Well, for that, I would have tried kexec, but it would require to stop
the host system anyway.
But if I get to run d-i on the FreeRunner via a µSD card, that's no more
than a small additional step!

> Many greetings
> 
> Steffen

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