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


From: Kevin "The Nuclear" Bloom
Subject: Re: [Dragora-users] Distribution of ARM rootfs tarballs
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2020 22:06:39 -0500
User-agent: mu4e 1.2.0; emacs 26.3

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



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