[Linwizard-users] unified image

[Trixter a. B. M. <tr...@0x...>]

I am unsure if this is better a users or devel question.  Technically I
think this is a users thing so I am posting it here.

I am planning on making (unless its already done and I just didnt see
it) a debian based distribution around haret+linwizard.  This will be a
NFS thing initially, although it can roll over into other things later
on.

Really the only thing that has to be done for this to work is to add
portmap to the initrd so that you can mount a NFS partition with that,
start it and mount.  I planned on writing a linuxrc script that would
detect the NFS options and do what is required to make that happen.

The reason that I think doing this would be slightly better would be
mainly that the NFS instructions do not work for me, it tries to mount
the partition before usb0 is up, fails and panics.  There is no suitable
error checking that the network is up first since its all in the kernel
and kernels shouldnt be doing a lot of checking, failover to something
else, etc.  That is not their job, and it should never be their job.  

This also leads to a framework where wifi modules and similar things can
be loaded once they are ready and just continue down that line.  This
also creates a clearer separation between the distribution and the
kernel work, which generally could help uptake (and thus bug testers at
least) since the distribution would be whatever gets mounted (NFS or
otherwise) and the initrd would just be responsible for loading modules
and similar things to get the system ready to mount the real root.

I already have a mostly working variant along these lines, so it will
only take a day or two to get it ready if anyone is interested in
testing.



There are some questions that I had regarding this however.

Is there a reason other than saving 2M or so for making it the way it is
where the NFS stuff does not use an initrd?

What is the proper way to install the packages?  I couldnt find
documentation on that and every tbz2 file that I downloaded had an error
while untarring, which made me think that the files arent plain tar
files.  I am guessing they are gentoo packages and because I got the
bare minimum I didnt get emerge or anything that way.

Are the binaries plain arm binaries, or are they compiled specifically
for the ARM926EJ-S processor?


Thanks

-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
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