Novena/Debian Wheezy Bootstrap

Debian Wheezy Debootstrap

A VERY ROUGH SET OF INSTRUCTIONS, RUN WITH CARE

This set of instructions assumes you have a functioning Novena board with Debian Wheezy. These instructions are primarily for people who want to re-create the firmware/base image. It relies on various bits and pieces of information on this wiki.

Prerequisites

• An existing Novena board running Debian Wheezy .
• Root access on your board, ideally have sudo access with no password.
• A 4gb microsd card.
• A reasonably fast network connection.
• Approximately 10gigs of free diskspace (more is probably better so you can cache things during testing/dev) - ideally get a SSD plugged into the board.
• Assumes 'you as a user' has tried building a linux kernel, u-boot etc...
  • i.e. we assume you have generated the kernel debian packages, uImage, uImage.dtb, the relevant boot loader and boot scripts.

Summary

• generate u-boot boot loader and boot script
  • See http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena/DebianBuildProcess#Compile_the_u-boot_boot_script
  • See http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena/DebianBuildProcess#Build_u-boot
• generate uImage and uImage.dtb file
  • See http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena/DebianBuildProcess#Build_Kernel
• generate debian packages for the kernel
  • See https://github.com/xobs/novena-linux/blob/3.15-rc1-novena/debian-build.sh
• generate a blockdevice or use a real sdcard
  • qemu-nbd was used in this example
  • first partition is a fat32 partition for the kernel and boot.scr
  • second partition is for the operating system
• debootstrap the second partition (via apt-cacher-ng to reduce network traffic)

Steps

Install at least these things...

sudo apt-get install -y qemu-utils apt-cacher-ng build-essential less rsync lzop u-boot-tools git debhelper bc device-tree-compiler parted

Here's is a run down of all the steps needed to generate a base image

# create image, then map it to a nbd, create and format partitions
qemu-img create novena.img 4G
# might need this
# sudo modprobe nbd max_part=16
sudo qemu-nbd --connect=/dev/nbd0 novena.img
sudo parted --script /dev/nbd0 -- mklabel msdos
# there might be alignment issues -- need to test
sudo parted --script /dev/nbd0 -- mkpart primary fat32 1 64
#sudo parted --script /dev/nbd0 -- mkpart primary fat32 0 64
sudo parted --script /dev/nbd0 -- mkpart primary ext4 64 -0
#sudo parted --script /dev/nbd0 -- set 1 boot on
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/nbd0p2
sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/nbd0p1

# mount the ext4 partition
sudo mount /dev/nbd0p2 /mnt

# use local apt-cacher-ng proxy
sudo debootstrap --include=sudo,openssh-server,ntpdate,dosfstools,sysvinit,fbset,less,xserver-xorg-video-modesetting,task-xfce-desktop,hicolor-icon-theme,gnome-icon-theme,tango-icon-theme,i3-wm,i3status wheezy /mnt http://127.0.0.1:3142/ftp.ie.debian.org/debian/

# basic configuration

sudo mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
sudo chroot /mnt mount -t proc none /proc
sudo chroot /mnt mount -t sysfs none /sys

sudo cp files/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d /mnt/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
echo root:kosagi | sudo chroot /mnt /usr/sbin/chpasswd

# install some basic things needed to kick of the networking etc...
sudo cp files/hostname /mnt/etc/hostname
sudo cp files/hosts /mnt/etc/hosts
sudo cp files/fstab /mnt/etc/fstab
sudo cp files/network/interfaces /mnt/etc/network/interfaces
sudo cp files/etc/apt/sources.list.d/kosagi.list /mnt/etc/apt/sources.list.d/kosagi.list
sudo cp files/etc/apt/sources.list /mnt/etc/apt/sources.list
sudo cp files/kosagi.gpg.key /mnt/root/kosagi.gpg.key
sudo chroot /mnt apt-key add /root/kosagi.gpg.key
sudo chroot /mnt apt-get update -y
sudo chroot /mnt env DEBCONF_NONINTERACTIVE_SEEN=true DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y imx-sdma-firmware
sudo chroot /mnt apt-get clean -y

sudo cp binaries/*.deb  /mnt/root
sudo chroot /mnt dpkg -i /root/linux-firmware-image-3.16.0-rc2-28074-g8b39edb_1.2_armhf.deb
sudo chroot /mnt dpkg -i /root/linux-image-3.16.0-rc2-28074-g8b39edb_1.2_armhf.deb
sudo chroot /mnt dpkg -i /root/linux-headers-3.16.0-rc2-28074-g8b39edb_1.2_armhf.deb

sudo rm /mnt/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/etc/X11
sudo cp files/etc/X11/xorg.conf /mnt/etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo cp files/etc/inittab /mnt/etc/inittab
sudo cp files/etc/default/locale /mnt/etc/default/locale

# setup boot loader
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/boot/bootloader 
sudo mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/boot/bootloader
sudo cp binaries/uImage /mnt/boot/bootloader/uImage
sudo cp binaries/imx6q-novena.dtb /mnt/boot/bootloader/uImage.dtb
sudo cp boot.scr  /mnt/boot/bootloader/boot.scr

sudo chroot /mnt umount /proc
sudo chroot /mnt umount /sys
sudo umount /mnt/dev/pts
sudo umount /mnt/dev

sudo umount /mnt/boot/bootloader
sudo umount /mnt
sudo dd if=binaries/u-boot.imx of=/dev/nbd0 seek=2 bs=512 conv=notrunc
sudo qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0