Thanks for the quick reply, Matias. See my comments below: > El 2020-01-29 16:50, Kevin "The Nuclear" Bloom escribió: >> Hi, > > Hello Kevin. :-) > >> Those of us who have a C201 know that installation on this device is >> quite nontraditional. Instead of booting off of a USB stick and running >> an installer, one must do it manually by loading an sd card (or usb >> stick) with a special kernel partition and a special root >> partition. What this means is that creating an ISO for this machine is >> pointless. Due to that, most distros that support the machine have a >> rootfs tarball that you unpack into the root partition and, normally, >> inside of /boot there is a linux.kpart or something that gets written to >> the kernel partition using `dd`. > > Okay. Question: what format would be appropriate for create the rootfs?. >
Arch-arm uses tar.gz and we probably should stick to that because some people might be unpacking it from ChromeOS which doesn't come with lzip installed. It can, however, unpack gzip. >> That being said, I'm curious as to how we wish to handle the >> distribution of Dragora 3 rootfs tarballs for this machine. Most >> distros' tarball is quite small and only contains the core system with >> simple network tools such as wpa-supplicant for connecting the machine >> to the internet (there is no Ethernet port, so wpa will be >> required). Once the core system is booted the user is expected to >> install the rest of the system via their package manager. Since Dragora >> doesn't have a package repo that contains precompiled binaries (that I'm >> aware of), I'm not sure how we want to do this. > > Here we could say that Dragora's "kernel" includes everything needed to boot > the > system, as well as the network part, including the wpa_supplicant currently. > As > for the packages, we can say that the official packages are provided and > distributed after each release[1]. In this sense, it is not a high priority > (for me) to provide updates to pre-compiled packages like any other > pre-compiled > package, since the distribution has to be finished, or at least until it > reaches > the stable one. > > [1] http://rsync.dragora.org/v3/packages/ > I think that is a good idea. Would take the stress away from trying to keep every package up-to-date all the time. I'm still curious about how we should manage downloading the binaries and then installing them in the correct order. Any ideas how to do this? (i.e. `wget -i BINARY-LIST.txt | qi -i` or something) >> My idea is this: we do the same thing that other distros do, for the >> most part. Keep the tarball small and use just the core system with some >> networking programs. The kernel will be in /boot under a name like >> kernel.kpart or something. Inside of the root home directory there will >> be a few different text files that contain urls to pre-compiled binary >> packages. Each file will have names that match up with the .order files >> when building D3: editors.txt, sound.txt, xorg.txt, etc. They will have >> all the programs in the orders that they need to be in to insure a safe >> installation. Then, the user uses a few commands to download and install >> each package (probably something with wget that passes the binary into a >> qi command). Once they've installed all the stuff they need, they'll be >> good to go! > > What I see here is that it is possible that the kernel configuration needs to > be > adjusted[2], in addition to testing it (very important), I do not own such a > computer, and if I did, I would not have enough time now to focus exclusively > on > this, considering all that needs to be done. I keep thinking about how these > lists will facilitate the installation of the packages (how to produce them > from > Qi), for the moment you can compile the core[3] and produce the rootfs, then > compile the rest to get the packages... > > [2] > http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/dragora.git/plain/archive/kernel/config-c201-v7 > [3] > http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/dragora.git/plain/recipes/00-core.order > Yes, I just completed the core build with the current master branch. Everything went smoothly except for meson, which has always been a problem child on the C201. I will be creating the signed kernel and attempting booting tomorrow, if time permits. >> Let me know if this is a good idea or if it need tweaked at all! This is >> quite a lot of work for only 1 machine but it's the only way I can think >> of other than just having all that stuff in the tarball but that would >> make it very large. > > I will try to assist you and provide you with what you need. > >> Thanks, >> >> Kev
