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Re: [Dragora-users] Distribution of ARM rootfs tarballs


From: Matias Fonzo
Subject: Re: [Dragora-users] Distribution of ARM rootfs tarballs
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2020 21:05:15 -0300
User-agent: Roundcube Webmail/1.3.8

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?.

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/

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

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



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