Hi guys,

Got my Efika working and loaded Debian on it. 600Mb on the disk later I got a working system and not much room left on a 720Mb drive. I'm looking to eventually run linux on a small CF card, so this will defenitely NOT do...

I've been reading about emdebian as one alternative for an embeded OS, but quite honestly the maturity level of this solution leaves me a little worried.

Looks like there is some work on Gentoo linux as well, but other than a statement that they are working on this, nothing much more.

I'm not a software / linux expert by any stretch of the imagination, so trying to work my way through some of the info I've found on the web has been very difficult at best. But this is what a develoment comunity is for right?

So if anyone has been making progress on getting a small linux distro on the Efkia, please let me know and share some of your insight!

Thanks!

Currently I use a Gentoo linux compiled against uClibc as a base system for Efika. It's quite easy to install and use and definitly smaller than Debian.

I did find some install instructions for Gentoo here:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/Efika

Is this what you used, or did you do something different?

Hmmm, I doesnt use it. I simply bootstrap Gentoo on my Pegasos and move it to Efika using pendrive thats all.

I also have a tiny uClibc based Gentoo root with thttpd, dropbear and busybox using baselayout lite in < 8Mb and some C CGI apps. If you have another PPC system, you can pretty easily set up something similar on any PPC Linux install, but I'm using Gentoo of course. :)

Download the stage3 uclibc tarball. Make sure you get the regular one and not the softfloat version since the 5200b has a floating point unit.

Unpack it and chroot in. From this chroot you can build the uClibc root that will go on your Efika. You will need a portage tree, so sync. You can also configure the rest of the software in the chroot to make it more comfortable to work with (vi!).

Using the ROOT environment variable, you can tell portage where to install software. I created a directory /efika in the chroot and then mounted my destination CF card's root partition in that directory.

I started by emerging baselayout-lite: This will configure the root file structure (/etc, /bin, etc.)

You'll probably want busybox as well for common unix apps like ls, grep, init, etc. Continue doing this as needed to add whatever you need to your root file system. If your package doesn't support building statically, make sure that you've emerged uclibc to the root as well.

Make sure you configure the rest of the install as well (/etc/fstab, time zone, serial console in inittab, etc.) as in any other normal Gentoo install.

Okay, so that was longer than expected and I glossed over a few details, but it really isn't that difficult. It's much more flexible than other methods and the results are quite impressive.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Thank you very much JoseJX, this info is great!

Only problem is that I don't have another PPC computer here... so I'm thinking this process may not work for me. Unless of course I can set-up a cross compilation enviromnent and get emerge to use that.

I've also found some instructions on setting up a bootable USB for x86. I'll try and see if that might not help me out here.

Well, for non-ppc systems, you can use the crossdev tool to build a powerpc toolchain. If you want to build with uClibc you would build your toolchain like this:
This page has more details and should help you get started:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embe ... opment.xml

I did something similar (chroot) but from an EFIKA Debian install. So I guess that it does not help in that thread, but it can help to install Gentoo from a Debian install with only an EFIKA board.

You only need an unused partition for it (of course).

1) Mount this partition under your Debian install.
Let's say you've called it "/mnt/gentoo" (use fstab or mount it manually)

2)Then bind proc and dev :
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/proc

3) Untar a stage3 into it :
cd /mnt/gentoo
tar jxvf ~/stage3-ppc-anything.tar.bz2

4) Copy your resolved network conf :
cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf

5) Then chroot into it:
chroot /mnt/gentoo

6) You should have a working Gentoo system.
Then you can "emerge -sync" and bootstrap it.
It's up to you.

Hello all,

Please find at :

http://people.debian.org/~luther/efika/di-efika

A new installer kernel for the efika. It will install debian/etch, and a kernel with efika support, which is based from the debian svn kernel repo, but which is a 2.6.19 kernel and not the 2.6.18 which will ship in etch.

You should avoid installing the graphical desktop task, which will install a full gnome desktop. Gnome is totally unusable on an efika, giving loads of 8-10 even while idle, and there is some funny flickering while gnome continuously redraws its menus or something.

I did an XFCE install, which is rather nice and usable, but gnome sure has bloated since i first used it all those years back on my 68030/50 based amiga.

Friendly,

Sven Luther

Working on setting all this up right now. Any recommendations for a lite ftp server?

hi Sven !

thanks for the new installer.
I do use XFCE on the Efika too, and it's quite usable even if a bit slow. I'll try e17 soon and see how it can perform on the Efika.

@SSQ:
e17 is slower than gnome on Pegasos.
Don't expect it to be faster than xfce on an EFIKA.

i don't expect it to be faster, but maybe usable.