Alix2d13 — Voyage Linux or Debian Live?

I am not sure whet­her it is cau­sed by the Ubuntu 10.10 amd64 run­ning on my work­sta­tion or on some bug in the Emde­bian pac­kage, but I do have a hard time to get Emde­bian instal­led. I have tried Mul­tistrap, Debootstrap, and Debian Instal­ler, and I have done it on the Alix com­pu­ter using PXE boot, on my work­sta­tion (follo­wed by chroot etc), and on vir­tual machi­nes using qemu/kvm or Vir­tu­al­box, but so far no luck.

All of this makes it less and less attemp­ting to actu­ally install any Emde­bian based Debian, and so I gradu­ally tur­ned back to Voyage Linux. When I was brow­sing the Voyage site I lear­ned about Debian Live, the system that “punkytse” uses to cre­ate the Voyage ima­ges, and also offers for down­load under tha name “Voyage SDK”. So now I am tes­ting Debian Live and try­ing to learn more about it.

The wiki and the manual seems to be a good place to start when lear­ning about Debian Live.

For those inte­res­ted in PC Engi­nes Alix the Alix forum may also be a good source of information.

(I should really find a bet­ter Word­Press theme, I know…)

Installing Linux on PC Engines Alix2d13 (part 2.5)

After publishing I rea­li­zed that I could have sup­plied more infor­ma­tion, and more down­lo­ads, than I did in my pre­vious post.

Here are links to pat­ched ver­sions of Debian netboot.tar.gz (stable/Squeeze, testing/Wheezy and daily build), all down­lo­a­ded and pat­ched today, 2011-05-10:

• netboot-ttyS0-stable-110510.tar.gz


• netboot-ttyS0-testing-110510.tar.gz


• netboot-ttyS0-daily-110510.tar.gz

What my script does, basi­cally, is this:

1. Untar the tar­ball and cd to debian-installer/i386/boot-screens/ where all changes are made.


2. In the file syslinux.cfg (which is actu­ally a file with PXELINUX con­fi­gu­ra­tions) two lines are added:
   
   
   
   1. serial 0 38400—tel­ling PXELINUX to use ttyS0 for I/O (i.e. as console).
   
   
   2. con­sole 0—do not try to use any video console
   
   
   
   


3. In the files adtxt.cfg, rqtxt.cfg and txt.cfg sub­sti­tute any occu­rence of vga=788 for ttyS0,38400n8. This is done in order to tell the ker­nel that:
   
   
   
   1. There is no graphic/video console
   
   
   2. The con­sole that should be used is the first serial port, and with the spe­ci­fied settings.