Installing Linux on PC Engines alix2d13 (part 1)

I have been wan­ting to try an Alix SBC from PC Engi­nes for some time now, and 10 days ago I finally did order one.

Tho­rough as I am I chec­ked lots of sites (mostly wit­hin the EU) for pri­ces, ship­ping, avai­la­bi­lity and range of acces­so­ries. In the end I chose to place my order at Gooze.

I had no trouble at all with my order from Gooze, they were very hel­p­ful and kind. I got a mail asking why I had orde­red anten­nas and pig­tails but no wifi card. I explai­ned that I was loo­king for a dual band card, and that I had not seen one in their web shop. Nine minu­tes later I got a reply say­ing that they had a Wist­ron DNMA-92 in stock, and that they would be able to add it to my order and still ship it the same day. Eas­ter holi­days delayed the ship­ping a bit, as expec­ted, but early mor­ning next busi­ness day the pac­kage arri­ved, and my new found fri­ends at Gooze had even mounted the board in the case, the wifi card on the board, and pig­tails and anten­nas where they should be.

I do not hesi­tate to recom­mend Gooze for anyone loo­king for an Alix system. They also have some use­ful tuto­ri­als on their site regar­ding Alix-iana, and even more on smartcards and secu­rity. (Their site inspi­red me to order a smartcard rea­der with Linux sup­port, the Fei­tian R-310, and a blank smartcard, Fei­tian PKI, for­merly known as Fei­tian FTCOS / PK-01C.

On a side note, I actu­ally pla­ced my order at 14:50 on Wed­nes­day  April 20. Gooze pro­mise that orders pla­ced before 15:00 will be ship­ped the same day, so when my order sta­tus had not changed the next day I wrote to them and poli­tely asked if the order sta­tus update was slow or if somet­hing else had hap­pened. I also made it clear that I was not at all in a hurry and had no pro­blem wai­ting for my stuff. Wit­hin minu­tes Jean-Michel Pouré of Gooze wrote back to me explai­ning that the entire staff had been to Lon­don for a day on a busi­ness trip. He apo­lo­gi­zed and pro­mi­sed to add anot­her smart card to my order at no extra cost. I had not expec­ted anyt­hing like that, and I would have been quite happy just to know that my order had arri­ved and would be ship­ped some day. That is really a good way to make happy (and retur­ning) customers.

Cur­rently I am try­ing to find the “per­fect” way to install Linux on this little gem, most likely Debian in some form. I have tried Voyage, a custo­mi­zed Debian for embed­ded plat­forms with expli­cit sup­port for Alix boards (inclu­ding the three front panel LED’s and the tem­pe­ra­ture sen­sors), and I think it might be good for a system as this one I would pre­fer to know what custo­mi­za­tions are made and why. I would be more com­for­table set­ting up the system myself from the ground up.

Gooze has a few nice howto’s on Alix stuff, and I also tested the Debian instal­la­tion sug­ges­ted. They sug­ges­ted instal­ling the net­boot tar­ball to a CF par­ti­tion, boot from this and using the Debian Instal­ler to install the latest stable ver­sion (Sque­eze). This went fine, but I ended up with a system that felt a bit too blo­a­ted, con­si­de­ring that it is embed­ded. Docu­men­ta­tion and man-pages are fine, but I feel no despe­rate need to waste a lot of flash memo­ryon an embed­ded system for it. When I need docu­men­ta­tion I can use my work­sta­tion or the web.

A con­cept that appe­als to me more is the Emde­bian pro­ject, pro­per Debian adap­ted for embed­ded systems. The idea is right, the docu­men­ta­tion sucks (or I am not able to find it). The Emde­bian fla­vor Grip seems to be about mini­mi­zing depen­den­cies to an abso­lute mini­mum, and also strip­ping docu­men­ta­tion from pac­ka­ges. They pro­cess the actual Debian pac­ka­ges, remove unne­ces­sary parts and repack them. You would nor­mally have both Emde­bian and clas­sic Debian repo­si­to­ries, so that pac­ka­ges that are not yet Emdebianized/Grip:ed will be pul­led from the nor­mal Debian repositories.

This sounds like the best of two worlds, the most com­mon 10 % of the Debian pac­ka­ges are avai­lable from Emde­bian, being smal­ler and having less depen­den­cies, and anyt­hing I want from the remai­ning 90 % is still avai­lable for instal­la­tion. I suspect that any vanilla pac­ka­ges that I install will be “upgra­ded” to Emde­bian style if they are con­ver­ted in the future.

But my cur­rent self impo­sed task is to work out a good (or “per­fect”) way to install a basic Emde­bian system to use as a start for my custo­mi­za­tions. The Emde­bian site recom­mends a tool cal­led mul­tistrap, being somewhat simi­lar to but dif­fe­rent from debootstrap. It will cre­ate a basic rootfs, but there is not a lot of infor­ma­tion on how to pro­ceed to a boo­table CF image. I have found some tuto­ri­als using debootstrap, but I am not sure if they apply since the tools work in dif­fe­rent ways. I will get back about this soon, I think.

Lastly, I tested OpenWRT too, that I have run­ning on my cur­rent router/firewall etc (an anci­ent Net­gear WGT634U). My first attempt at com­piling an image for Alix did not work out (though OpenWRT does have expli­cit sup­port for Alix), pro­bably some miscon­fi­gu­ra­tion on my side, but I tested with a plain x86 image that I down­lo­a­ded, it worked just fine, and com­pa­red to all other Linu­ces I tested this one was defi­ni­tely the fas­test! It boots in maybe 20 – 40 % of the time the others need, and system shut­down is even fas­ter rela­tive to the com­pe­ti­tion. It does not have the back­bone of the huge Debian com­mu­nity, but the sheer speed of it still makes it inte­re­s­ting as an alternative.

Billig mycket avancerad router

Jag har lekt lite med OpenWRT, en slags linux-distribution som är gjord för att instal­lera på vissa tråd­lösa routrar/bredbandsdelare, på min gamla Net­gear WGT634U, men inte kom­mit mig för med att fak­tiskt använda den till något vet­tigt än. Jag fun­de­rade på att lägga över min Aste­risk–tele­fon­växel på den, men är inte säker på att jag fak­tiskt vill göra hela min tele­foni bero­ende av just den lilla bur­ken innan jag har tes­tat den betyd­ligt mer. Det skulle givet­vis också gå utmärkt att använda den som rou­ter, brand­vägg, bred­bands­de­lare, och jag skulle ju då kunna få den att göra helt andra saker än den kla­rar med original-firmware, till exem­pel att sköta QoS(Quality of Ser­vice) eller TC(Traffic Con­trol) för att den vik­tiga tra­fi­ken, som VoIP(internet-telefoni), all­tid skall få den kapa­ci­tet den behö­ver, och sätta upp en brand­vägg som gör pre­cis det som jag vill, utan kompromisser.

Nu läste jag pre­cis på life­hac­ker om tomato, en annan fir­m­ware för Link­sys (WRT54G/GS/GL) och andra rout­rar, också öppen käll­kod lik­som OpenWRT och DD-WRT (som life­hac­ker skri­vit om tidi­gare). Det jag slås av när jag läser arti­keln på life­hac­ker är de snygga bil­derna, vac­ker och ända­måls­en­lig gra­fik som visar flö­det genom rou­tern, för­del­ningen av tra­fi­ken på de olika QoS-klasserna med mera. Det är ärligt talat betyd­ligt snyg­gare, mer illust­ra­tivt och använd­bart än vad jag har sett på min WGT634U med OpenWRT och webb-gränssnittet Webif² från X-Wrt. En Link­sys WRT54GL kan man just idag få för 501 kro­nor enligt Pris­jakt, och flas­har man om den med roli­gare fir­m­ware får man en extremt kraft­full rou­ter där man bland annat kan vrida upp sänd­nings­ef­fek­ten på det tråd­lösa nät­ver­ket så högt man bara törs.

Jag har annars äntli­gen lyc­kats få brand­väg­gen Sho­re­wall att han­tera QoS/TC som jag vill. Jag lyc­ka­des inte få modu­len IPP2P att fun­gera på min Debian-server som job­bar som brand­vägg, rou­ter, tele­fon­växel med mera, och exemp­len i Sho­re­wall byg­ger på att man har den modu­len om man vill kunna styra hur myc­ket band­bredd P2P–pro­to­koll skall få ta i anspråk. Där­e­mot ver­kade jag kunna få con­nec­tion mar­king (CONNMARK) att fun­gera. Det ger inte myc­ket om man bara kan mar­kera ett visst paket som pra­tar med en viss port som hög– eller låg­pri­o­ri­te­rat, om res­ten av tra­fi­ken använ­der andra por­tar in eller ut, men jag hit­tade ett sätt att mar­kera hela den aktu­ella anslut­ningen som den nivå jag ville. Jag skri­ver mer om det senare, i en egen text. (Sho­re­wall är för övrigt ett av alter­na­ti­ven för den som vill bygga en brand­vägg under OpenWRT eller dess syskon.)

Andra blog­gar om: linux, rou­ter, brand­vägg, bred­bands­de­lare, OpenWRT, Debian, Sho­re­wall