[pkg-fso-maint] GSoC 2010: Debian Installer on Freerunner

[Thibaut GIRKA]

Le samedi 20 mars 2010 à 18:03 +0100, "Steffen Möller" a écrit : 
> Hi Thibaut,
> 
> > Von: Thibaut GIRKA <thib at sitedethib.com>
> > I am a French student, Debian user, Neo FreeRunner owner, and I'm really
> > interested in porting the Debian Installer to the FreeRunner (on which
> > I've installed Debian manually, although SHR unstable is my main OS).
> 
> this is good news! You are the first to speak out his interest.
>  
> > Although I don't know much about d-i yet, I use Debian daily on several
> > machines, and I am maintaining a Debian package: bluemindo.
> > By the way, I've built custom Debian CD images and PXE boot images using
> > live-helper, and knows what an initial ram disk or a kernel is.
> > I also have skills in C and Python, and I have some experience in
> > contributing to FLOSS projects.
> 
> All fine with me. Concerning mentoring, my concern is that you have deserved a better mentor than me sine I have no experience with d-i either. But your English is fine, so I am very confident you can communicate your questions easily. Also, the d-i hard core groups are not too far away from you in physical terms, you can even spend some time there, I presume.

Thanks :)
What do you mean by "not too far away from you in physical terms"?

> > Regarding the FreeRunner, I've got one since the beginning of the year,
> > and I use it as my sole phone.
> Ok, I write emails, then.
> 
> > I have flashed SHR unstable on the NAND, and I've manually (reading the
> > so-called install.sh script) installed Debian on a µSD card, although I
> > rarely use it.
> 
> You can certainly ask yourself why you are preferring something else than Debian.

Yeah, I mainly use my FR as a phone, and Debian is lacking good
telephony apps at the moment, that's all.

> > I haven't tried d-i on the FreeRunner yet, but I think the main
> > issues/things to do would be:
> > * Starting d-i. I can see two ways of doing it:
> >   - Putting it on a µSD card, maybe not the easiest thing if there's
> > already something on it.
> 
> As a _start_ I suggest to run d-i as a direct substitute to install.sh . If this is not possible, well, maybe I would even go for an emulated environment on your desktop from which you can then write to an SD directly which would then boot your phone.

> >   - Using kexec on a host system to run d-i without altering the
> > partition table beforehand.
> > * Using the kernel from pkg-fso
> > * Hacking g-i to work with the touchscreen and
> > provide an on-screen keyboard.
> >   As far as I know, directfb is being dropped in favor of X11, so, it
> > shouldn't be that much of an issue.
> 
> Right, go for the simplest variant that is possible.
> 
> > * Including all those things in a fairly lightweight initrd.
> 
> Well, how do you get the initrd to boot? On an SD from where to write to the Flash? It would be nice if the phone could boot from USB or if it could find a boot image and kernel from the net.

Hm, I wasn't targeting the NAND, but the µSD. Since the kernel and
initrd are loaded in the RAM, no need to keep the partition on which
they were put in order for U-Boot/Qi to load them.

I would be interested in USB booting aswell, but I didn't find anything
about it.
We could use dfu-util to push the kernel into the RAM, but according to
the manpage, we can only transfer up to 2MB that way...

> Until you get a more competent mentor, your mentor suggest to aim as low as possible, which usually is more complicated than one thinks in the first place. And you can then add to that minimal plan as much as you can achieve.
> 
> The minimal plan (IMHO) is to produce an SD that a regular user can put into the device and boot from. If you say that you want to produce the device with the OpenMoko and that you have a good idea how this will work, fine. My hunch is, though, that it will be much easier to achieve with a virtual machine that has access to the SD. You will be sufficiently busy to set this up (newer kernels make problems with ARM QEMU on amd64, at least for me) and then there is enough to change to have d-i ask the right questions and generally for to it what is in install.sh .  Once you have set this all up, then I suggest to prepare a Debian package that automates your setup, allows the user to push an SD into their desktop's slot and prepare the image with the d-i.
> 
> If you want to do it differently, then this is just fine with me, really.

Well, yeah, my initial goal was to have d-i running on the Freerunner,
but the QEMU approach would be a good start.

> Also, I expect some other readers of this list to be not really happy with what I was proposing here, preferring just something that works from SHR or whatever boots the device, directly.  So, dear all, speak out, maybe the perfect mentor is crystallizing from this now pending discussion .... or Thibaut will just be community-mentored :)

Well, for that, I would have tried kexec, but it would require to stop
the host system anyway.
But if I get to run d-i on the FreeRunner via a µSD card, that's no more
than a small additional step!

> Many greetings
> 
> Steffen

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