Hello, I am considering to try and port Debian to the Excito B3 [1]. This is a small size, low consuption, Marvell Kirkwood-based home server.
[1] http://www.excito.com/bubba/products/overview.html B3s are provided with a pre-installed custom Debian, with a custom kernel and a specific web-based administration interface. I had some email exchange with Excito! the kernel customization are for handling LEDs and switches, nothing very important for the beginning. They boot using Das U-Boot, which is installed on flash banks, and configured to look for a kernel uImage on either: • normal mode: internal SATA drive, first MS-DOS partition, Ext2/3 file system, a given path; • rescue mode: external USB drive, first MS-DOS partition, FAT file system, a given path. The only no-so-cool think I can see with the B3 is that its serial port is not very accessible, as it requires soldering. This will be a good occasion for me to finally get a soldering iron. :-) So I think porting Debian simply means adapting flash-kernel to install the uImage to the right path, and building installation images for USB drives. I will have some questions about flash-kernel and devio, but I shall ask them in another message. Is there anything I forget? Excito are quite friendly to free software developers, and they can offer some rebates for free software development. They can even provide hardware for free to work on Debian: I think I shall ask one, but if the project or other contributors need some ARM hardware, they may be a hardware sponsor. -- ,--. : /` ) Tanguy Ortolo <xmpp:tan...@ortolo.eu> <irc://irc.oftc.net/Elessar> | `-' Debian Maintainer \_
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