Mac

June 11, 2009

Installing Linux Debian Lenny on an Alix board

Filed under: Uncategorized — mac @ 3:42 pm

Goal:
This process shows how to create a bootable CFCard that can be used to boot a PC Engines Alix board. The OS chosen is Debian Lenny.
Setup:

Alix 1d

Prepare the CF Card:
Assuming your CF Card is on /dev/sdb, you first need to create a partition:

fdisk /dev/sdb
d1

To delete the old partition… then create a new partition, primary, type 83.

The format the partition and avoid system checks (write cycles are limited on a CF Card):

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
tune2fs -c 0 /dev/sdb1

Installing the base system

apt-get install debootstrap
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/
debootstrap –arch i386 lenny /mnt/ http://ftp.debian.org/debian

Mount /proc and /sys and chroot:

mkdir /mnt/proc
mkdir /mnt/sys
mount –bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount –bind /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
mount devpts /dev/pts -t devpts

Initial file setup

Create the following files:
Check, create and/or adapt the following lines:

/etc/fstab

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext3 noatime,errors=remount-ro,commit=120 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0
tmpfs /var/run tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/lock tmpfs defaults 0 0

/etc/hostname