I've been running Arch Linux on most of my machines, including the Dockstar, but I am getting more and more annoyed by the horrible system breakages that occur regularly when updating Arch. The amount of maintenance required is just too high for my taste - even for a rolling release distro it does not have to be that bad.
So I decided to install Debian Wheezy on my Dockstar, which, as it turned out is not as easy as I would have liked. There is no image available like there is for Arch, which is why I packaged my installation after going through all the trouble getting a working system.
So I decided to install Debian Wheezy on my Dockstar, which, as it turned out is not as easy as I would have liked. There is no image available like there is for Arch, which is why I packaged my installation after going through all the trouble getting a working system.
To get a working Debian installation for your Dockstar, you have to use debootstrap, or Doozan's Debian install script, which tries to automate most of the work required to get a working Debian installation.
This script uses debootstrap itself, but unfortunately, it does not work
from the Dockstar's default system. At some point it (or rather debootstrap) complains about the kernel being too old. At this point, you have to replace the system on the Dockstar's NAND with a system with a newer kernel, but to do that you first have to prepare a USB memory device to boot some other Linux system, that can then be used to install a system to the NAND. A recommended system for the Dockstar's NAND is the Kirkwood/*Plug* Recovery System.
I first tried to install that recovery system from OpenWRT, which I had on a USB memory stick, but it did not work. It seems that the system to be used for installing the recovery system has to use glibc, not uclibc or some other libc.
I finally managed to install that recovery system, then boot into it and from there install Debian Wheezy with the script mentioned above.
That worked fine, except it did not take anywhere near those 20 minutes mentioned there, but almost two hours. Most of the time has been spent writing stuff to my USB stick, so maybe that stick is just extremely slow. Fortunately, booting from that stick is reasonably fast, so I'm okay with it.
To save you the trouble with all that, I've packaged the finished install, which you can use to get a working Debian Wheezy system. Assuming you have an up-to-date uboot bootloader installed on your Dockstar, all you have to do is prepare a USB stick (or USB harddisk) with at least one partition formatted as ext2 (with at least 500 MB of free space) and then extract my image onto that partition (from some Linux system as root).
debian-wheezy-dockstar-130512.tar.xz (78 MB)
md5sum: bb39bbb50660a9e4eec733ca37d464f7
The system is almost exactly the same as the one you would get from running Doozan's script. root's password is 'root', so better change that immediately. The only change I have made, was to omit the swap space. You can easily add swap later on if you really want to, but I would advise against it, unless you are running your system off an USB harddisk, as it can quickly ruin your USB flash memory. I have had good experiences with zram based swap, but unfortunately the Debian kirkwood kernel is missing the zram module, so this won't work without rebuilding the kernel.
To save you the trouble with all that, I've packaged the finished install, which you can use to get a working Debian Wheezy system. Assuming you have an up-to-date uboot bootloader installed on your Dockstar, all you have to do is prepare a USB stick (or USB harddisk) with at least one partition formatted as ext2 (with at least 500 MB of free space) and then extract my image onto that partition (from some Linux system as root).
debian-wheezy-dockstar-130512.tar.xz (78 MB)
md5sum: bb39bbb50660a9e4eec733ca37d464f7
The system is almost exactly the same as the one you would get from running Doozan's script. root's password is 'root', so better change that immediately. The only change I have made, was to omit the swap space. You can easily add swap later on if you really want to, but I would advise against it, unless you are running your system off an USB harddisk, as it can quickly ruin your USB flash memory. I have had good experiences with zram based swap, but unfortunately the Debian kirkwood kernel is missing the zram module, so this won't work without rebuilding the kernel.