Hi, I hope I didn't offend anyone with my possibly somewhat harsh tirade against burning CF cards externally yesterday. Meanwhile, an installation procedure for linux that in my view is both the most standard and easiest to follow, has been bubbling up from the depth of my memory.
First, I was wrong about having to use NFS. I have mounted a Debian root fs over NFS in the past, but with both OpenBSD and Linux setting up NFS can be skipped. The only thing required is a PXE boot server. This of course involves setting up PXE/TFTP/DHCP, which should be not much harder than setting up a CF burning environment on an external host. For Linux setting up a boot server is well-described in the Debian Installation Guide, but it should apply to all Linux distros. PXELINUX, tftpd and dhcpd are al 3d-party progs after all. Getting the right TFTP server can be a bit of a headache; tftpd-hpa is the one to use I believe. For OpenBSD, just make TFTP fetch a bsd.rd kernel (a kernel with a builtin root fs which a.o. contains the installation scripts), and install the OS using the 'ftp' method. Easy, fast, reliable and, even more important, complies with every applicable standard. I've never had any trouble with this. For Linux, a similar procedure can be followed: - have PXELINUX fetch the installation kernel, i.e. the kernel that is used for installing the OS - in addidition, make it load the initrd image labeled as "netboot" or someting similar - see distro manual for details. The initrd image should of course support the text mode installation. - boot the Soekris and install over FTP as if you had booted from floppy/CD. - The Debian Installation Guide also describes setting up debootstrap, which uses wget for fetching packages. I forgot how to set it up - I think that you have to install it after the first reboot - but I do clearly remember being amazed at its performance. I don't think it's necessary to use it, it just speeds up the overall installation. I hope I haven't missed anything here, it's been years ago since I last installed Linux on a Soekris, what I'm trying to point out is that doing a "live" install isn't much harder, maybe even a lot easier taking all the boot trouble (and doc parsing) in account, than following the "burn on PC" hack. Provided you have managed to set up the boot server properly, this procedure should work like a rock. The nice thing is that once properly set up, the boot server provides great flexibilty and can be used for various purposes, like rescueing a broken system on CF. I guess this truely is a "Re: [Soekris] installing linux on net4801";). Bill On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 10:54 +0200, Domenico Cacciari wrote: > Hi, > i´ve installed linux ubuntu 2.6.20-16-server with grub on cf card... i > have all the output on serial console but when the net4801 boots up > after grub i don´t see nothing, i have only one long and one short flash > of the disk activity led but no more. > Ther are some specific parameters for the kernel or what? someone can > help me? thanks > -- "Fix bugs first, add features later" _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
