Building Debian Linux distribution for iMX233-OLinuXino

iMX233-OLinuXino Debian rootfs generation

If you want to skip the procedures below, the good news is that we have already pre-build Debian rootfs and you can just download it from here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-bAEPML8fwlOHJkX2ZNanVfR2s

and then just read how to make your bootable SD-card as described here: https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/SOFTWARE/DEBIAN/README.TXT

Otherwise if you want to go through the learning path follow these instructions:

1. Prepare empty file system – it’s good to be > 500MB, in this example we make it 1GB

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=my.img bs=1024 count=1MB

2. Format the image with the desired root fs, in this example -ext3

$ sudo mkfs.ext3 -F my.img

3. Mount the image

$ mkdir rootfs
$ sudo mount -o loop my.img rootfs/

4. Install Debian toor file system phase 1

$ sudo debootstrap –verbose –arch armel –variant=minbase –foreign squeeze rootfs/http://ftp.debian.org/debian

5. Install the packages necessary for emulation of armel with x86.
Note: If you make installation of ‘Debian squeeze’ you must install newer version of ‘qemu-user-static’ (otherwise you will see error qemu: Unsupported syscall: 341 when you generate the image in phase 2)

Only for ‘Debian squeeze’

Add these lines in /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -10

add in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf

APT::Default-Release “stable”;

add in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib

update the list of the packages

$ sudo apt-get update

install qemu-user-static

$ sudo apt-get install -t testing qemu-user-static

install binfmt-support

$ sudo apt-get install binfmt-support

6. Start of phase 2 (this is executed on virtual armel machine). Do these commands:

$ sudo modprobe binfmt_misc
$ sudo cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static rootfs/usr/bin
$ sudo mkdir rootfs/dev/pts
$ sudo mount -t devpts devpts rootfs/dev/pts
$ sudo mount -t proc proc rootfs/proc
$ sudo chroot rootfs/

(this is executed on virtual armel machine)
$ /debootstrap/debootstrap –second-stage

7. To add the apt repositories, you must append these lines in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

8. Update the list of the packages

$ apt-get update

9. Config your language

$ export LANG=C
$ apt-get install apt-utils dialog locales

$ dpkg-reconfigure locales
$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

10. Installation of some important packages

$ apt-get install dhcp3-client udev netbase ifupdown iproute openssh-server iputils-ping wget net-tools ntpdate nano less

11. Config your network adapter usb11 and dhcp. Add in /etc/network/interfaces these lines

# Wireless interfaces
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless_mode managed
wireless_essid any
wpa-driver wext
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

auto usb0
iface usb0 inet dhcp

12. To config the file system add in /etc/fstab these lines:

/dev/root /dev/sda2 ext3 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

13. To config the console

$ echo ‘T0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAM0 115200 linux’ >> /etc/inittab
$ sed -i ‘s/^\([1-6]:.* tty[1-6]\)/#\1/’ /etc/inittab

13. To config the host name:

$ hostname <name>

14. To add root password

$ passwd

15. Exit from the armel virtual machine

$ exit

16. TO install the modules of Linux Kernel

$ sudo make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- INSTALL_MOD_PATH=<path_to>/rootfs modules_install

17. and unfortunately this is only the beginning 🙂

in this image we still didn’t manage to enable the TV-console, so we will try to do it later

Stanimir Bonev, Olimex Ltd

EDIT 09/7/2012: there is improvement on how to install the peripherial modules on the Debian distro: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/olinuxino/message/889