Roboard and Buildroot

[salec]

Greetings everyone,
I recently finished configuring a very specific build of Linux for the RB-100 using BuildRoot. I decided to use this instead of X-Linux because I wanted finer control over how things are built.

The Linux image uses the latest Kernel w/ BusyBox and uCLibC. I've currently got it detecting all devices on the board as well as the popular VGA card included in the starter kit as well as the VT6655 wireless PCI card.

I've excluded many items such as unused locales and documentation to keep the image size small. That said, it includes most shell utilities, sshd, ftpd, and some other common apps.

The kernel including init.d scripts boot in about 4.5 seconds (not including bios). A good amount of time is spent decompressing the kernel. This weekend I'm going to see booting from an uncompressed kernel will reduce my times.

I'll be posting my build online later today along with a modified version of BuildRoot that includes support for the RoBoard and package support for the SDK.

I'm curious what other packages and drivers people are using with the RoBoard? I'd like to keep polishing this off to make it a suitable replacment to the XLinux image

-Shaun

[veltrop]

I just got my Roboard and was working on it all weekend. I've been using the Debian 5 image from DMP. Unfortunately getting the boot time down on that hasn't worked out so well. And installing the binutils package breaks my glibc...

That being said, I would love to have an image (DD, ghost, DMG) of your distro!

[Chaosmann]

Hi, I would like to test your Linux version. There is already an image to download?

[salec]

Been busier than I had thought

I've been updating the image and found that it now takes about 7 seconds to boot (ignoring the BIOS) due to the added USB and Audio drivers added to the kernel. I have some ideas on how to reduce this down but it will require patches to be applied to the kernel.

I've also added a few extra scripts on top of the basic buildroot package that I will need to document

I'm hoping to include both the final image that I use as well as a buildroot package w/ tutorial on building your own image for the RoBoard.

I'll shoot up another post w/ links when it's ready to download. Again, sorry for the delay

[veltrop]

Well the Debian 5 image from DMP was FUBAR.

After another week Ive managed to get Debian 5 running on it myself. The kernel in the Debian 5 installer doesn't boot the roboard. I tried installing it through a VMWare but using VMware fusion on my Hackintosh caused problems with USB when it came time to format the SD card.

So I installed the Debian 4 minimal net install directly on the Roboard, then installed the 2.6.29.1 kernel from roboard.com. Then I upgraded to Debian 5.

Now I'm busy getting the wireless drivers to work. The kernel from Roboard didn't have wireless extensions built in so I needed to rebuild it. Had a fun time learning about Debian's make-kpkg.

salec do you have the VIA wireless card working? That would be great to include.

Unfortunately in the end I think I am stuck using a distribution such as Debian becuase I'm using ROS and having the dependency tree of prebuilt binaries from Debian is nice to satisfy ROS dependencies.

[salec]

I have the wireless driver built but haven't actually used it yet. I'm still waiting for my usb-to-serial cable to arrive and once it does I can switch from the VGA card to the Wifi card.

The problem with using Buildroot is that any changes made will result in a few hours burnt compiling. I originally did this on a MacBook Pro using Parallels but later migrated to a dedicated Linux box.

I uploaded my current image to http://home.salec.net/SpiderLinux.bz2

This is just a temporary location!! I'll be moving it later to a better spot. It's a compressed ext2 image. After decompression just do "mount -o loop rootfs.i486.ext2 /mnt/some/path" and then from there copy the files onto your flash drive.

Let me know how it works out. Once I have more time this week I'll place it in a better spot along with the buildroot package and configs used to make it.

[ea4ps]

Hi everybody!!

Salec, I'm trying to install your SO image, but I have some question about this:
if I copy in my SD your mounted image I get many errors of type "can't create symbolic link"
i think, not be better to make an image with dd command?
what happends to the MBR (boot sector)?

I wanted to test your image because I need wlan support and do not dare to compile the kernel source of DMP to enable this module

Thanks for your help

EDIT: I thought maybe I could reuse the file storaged in /boot directory that contains information about your compilation, named "linux-2.6.30.2.config". I could to compile kernel-source adding as parameter this file. Is possible?