On Fri, 4 Jan 2013 01:34:59 -0800, Tracy Reed <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hello all,
I have just received a couple ODROID-U2 boards:
http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/main.php
I am eager to try them out. They seem perfect to fill my need for
basic
standalone (not virtualized) gateway/bastion host machines among
other small
tasks that I don't want to dedicate a whole power hungry server and
1u of rack
space to.
I love the idea of an ARM based distro based on a PNAELV so I can
manage this
machine just like all of my other big servers.
But it doesn't look like there is much activity around this distro.
The mailing list archives contain only a few postings per month.
The mailing list is fairly low bandwidth. Most people seem to get by OK
with
what is on the wiki, and various users have contributed articles on
getting
it working on some of the more popular devices.
Is the distro being kept
up to date with security patches etc?
Relatively few of the updates on PNAELV are security related, and at
the moment
the build process is still somewhat manual. If you want to see a
particular
update applied, do mention it here and I'll put it through.
At some point in the not too distant future I hope to get around to
getting an
automated build system in place, but since this project isn't sponsored
by
anyone, I have this thing called a "job" that really eats into my free
time
available to work on RS. ;)
I'm a little unclear on how to install this. Apparently it doesn't
use Anaconda
and the usual installer.
Anaconda doesn't work on ARM yet. I'm not even sure they have it fully
working
on the latest Fedora yet. Because there is very little in terms of
common
standards on ARM, most devices require a proprietary kernel and a
proprietary
installation method.
I just dd rsel6-rootfs.tar.bz2 to a cfcard and boot
it?
No. It depends on how your device works, where the kernel comes from,
etc.
Tyically installation involves taking a copy of the file system it
ships,
copying the kernel (usually but not always under /boot), /lib/modules
and
/lib/firmware onto a fresh file system on the new boot device, and
extracting the RS tar ball on top of that. Depending on your
boot loader, that should work in most cases.
Note that upstream PNAELV kernels won't work on most devices - they are
based on a mainline kernel that predates support for a lot of the
devices
available today, and this is not easily back-portable. One exception is
Marvell Kirkwood support (Sheeva/Guru/Dream Plug), but from what I can
tell most people still tend to use whatever kernel originally ships
with the device since this tends to be somewhat better tested at the
moment.
Is the Alpha release from Feb 2012 still the latest?
Yes, but some of the packages have been updated since then.
Thanks and I really hope this takes off!
In that case, please spread the word and contributed a wiki article
specific to your device once you have it working. :)
Gordan
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