/contrib/famzah

There are two major steps in installing Debian on your Bifferboard:

1. Kernel installation on the Bifferboard.
2. Rootfs installation on a USB device or an SD/MMC card.

Kernel installation on the Bifferboard

Download a pre-built kernel binary image:

• vmlinuz-2.6.30.5-bifferboard-ipipe (909K)
• vmlinuz-2.6.32-bifferboard (906K) – EXPERIMENTAL

The kernel is compiled with (almost) all possible modules, so your Bifferboard should be able to easily use any device supported on Debian. Once you have downloaded the kernel image, you can then upload it to the Bifferboard, as advised at the Biffboot Wiki page. You have two options to upload the kernel – via the serial port or over the ethernet. Both work well.

Example: Assuming that you have the Bifferboard SVN repository checked out in “~/biffer/svn“, you have downloaded the “vmlinuz-2.6.30.5-bifferboard-ipipe” kernel image in “/tmp“, your Bifferboard has a MAC address of “00:B3:F6:00:37:A9“, and you have connected it on the Ethernet port “eth0” of your computer, here are the commands that you would need to use:

cd ~/biffer/svn/utils
sudo ./bb_eth_upload.py eth0 00:B3:F6:00:37:A9 /tmp/vmlinuz-2.6.30.5-bifferboard-ipipe

Rootfs installation on a USB device or an SD/MMC card

Once you have the kernel “installed” on the Bifferboard and ready to boot, you need to prepare a rootfs media. This is where your Debian installation is stored and booted from. Download one of the following pre-built rootfs images (default root password is “biffroot”):

• Debian “lenny” for Bifferboard – minimal (download size 95M, uncompressed size 346MB).
• Debian “lenny” for Bifferboard – developer (download size 129M, uncompressed size 468MB).

The “developer” version adds the following packages: build-essential, perl, links, manpages, manpages-dev, man-db, mc, vim. Note that for each image you will need at least 100MB more free on the rootfs media.

In order to populate the rootfs media, you have to do the following:

1. Create one primary partition, format it as “ext3″ and then mount the USB device or SD/MMC card.
2. Extract the archive in the mounted directory.
3. Unmount the directory.

Example: Assuming that you have the Bifferboard SVN repository checked out in “~/biffer/svn“, you have downloaded the “minimal” rootfs image in “/tmp“, and you are using an SD/MMC card under the device name “/dev/mmcblk0“, here are the commands that you would need to use:

sudo bash
mkdir /mnt/rootfs
cd ~/biffer/svn/debian/rootfs
./format-and-mount.sh /dev/mmcblk0 /mnt/rootfs
tar -jxf /tmp/debian-lenny-bifferboard-rootfs-minimal.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/rootfs
umount /mnt/rootfs
# CHANGE THE DEFAULT ROOT PASSWORD!

When you have the USB device or SD/MMC card ready and populated with the customized Debian rootfs, plug it in Bifferboard, attach a serial cable to Bifferboard, if you have one, and boot it up.

That’s it. Enjoy your Bifferboard running Debian.

Update: As already mentioned in the comments below, you would probably need to set up swap too. Here is my recipe:

# change "128" (MBytes) below to a number which suits your needs
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=128
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile # enables swap right away; disable with "swapoff -a"
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' >> /etc/fstab # enables swap at system boot

Using a file for swap on a 2.6 Linux kernel has the same performances as using a separate swap partition as discussed at LKML.

P.S. If you want to build your own customized Debian rootfs image for Bifferboard – checkout the Bifferboard SVN repository and review the instructions in “debian/rootfs/images.txt“.

References:

• dpkg: extract specific file.
• Other similar Debian projects for Bifferboard – Bifferboard Wiki “Home‎ > ‎’Desktop’ Linux Distributions‎ > ‎Debian” page.
• Pinouts for the standard single USB Bifferboard.
• Bifferboard with 2 USB ports – hardware specification and pinouts.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 8:46 am and is filed under Bifferboard, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.