On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 5:47 AM, pgnd <pgnet.dev+soek...@gmail.com> wrote: > i've a soekris 4801 that's been running freebsd 6x for ages. it's got > 'the usual' optimized, custom kernel. > > planning to move to soekris 5xxx boxes w/ hard-drive here soon, i'm > looking at switching to openSUSE 11.3, and using a VirtualBox VM to > 'prep' the system. > > setting up the VM is, of course, trivial -- and a heck of a lot more > flexible/powerful than the Soekris itself. the goal is, once 'done > enough' on the VM, to dd the VM's drive to a physical drive, install > the drive in the Soekris, and --hopefully -- boot.
Depending on your VM platform - the drivers that go into the initrd image may not match that of the Soekris board. It may not be a simple transfer of image to the hard drive for the Soekris board. > Question: is the Opensuse 11.3 kernel -- with it's typical dynamic > module loading -- sufficient to boot the Soekris 4801? Do I *need* to > build a custom kernel? I have been using openSUSE in it's original incarnate since 5.x but IMO it may be an overkill for an embedded device. I have been experimenting with Voyage Linux (a stripped down Debian). VL provides tools to create/install for the Soekris and ALIX boards. You can attach the hard drive to your desktop using an external USB adapter and install VL on it. The default install simply works out of the box. You can further customize it by adding Debian repos and pulling in your favorite packages. I have added a whole bunch of packages including CUPS and the install comes under 190 MB (after clean up). Besides, I have also noticed that Debian boots up and shuts down faster. HTH -- Arun Khan _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
