There are two major steps in installing Debian on your Bifferboard:
- Kernel installation on the Bifferboard
- Rootfs installation on a USB device
Download the pre-built kernel binary image as a .deb package which you will find at this article. This kernel is compiled with (almost) all possible modules, so your Bifferboard should be able to easily use any device supported on Debian. You need to extract only the kernel image file from this .deb package. The following command shows how to achieve this:
dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile linux-image-2.6.30.5-bifferboard_2.6.30.5-bifferboard-10.00.Custom_i386.deb|tar -xf - ./boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30.5-bifferboard
This command will extract the bzImage image “vmlinuz-2.6.30.5-bifferboard” in a subdirectory named “boot/”. You can then upload the kernel image 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.
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. Follow the instructions at the article Debian rootfs installation customized for Bifferboard.
When you have the USB device 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.
(optional) Upon boot, press <ESC> at the very beginning, in order to enter the menu of the boot loader. Press “m” to set the kernel boot command line. Enter the string as advised at the Debian kernel article, and then press “w” to save this permanently. Finally, press “g” to boot the system.
If you don’t have a serial cable, you should be alright with the default Bifferboard kernel boot command line. At the time of writing this, it only has the additional “init=/etc/preinit” option which is not needed for our setup, but it will be ignored by the kernel at boot time, so you should be all set. In such a case, you may notice the kernel error message “Failed to execute /etc/preinit. Attempting defaults…” – just ignore it.
That’s it. Enjoy your Bifferboard running Debian.
P.S. This is similar to the “debif” project. What I tried to achieve in a different way is to provide a bit more documentation and options for users to build and customize the system as they need.
Update: Another guy did a similar work to mine and decided to fork a new project. It’s getting inappropriate that I list all existing alternative projects here. You can view a full list at the Bifferboard Wiki “Home > ’Desktop’ Linux Distributions > Debian” page.
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