[Freedombox-discuss] my experience with make weekly-card

Thu Jul 5 22:28:41 UTC 2012

If, like me, you want to follow Nick's instructions for building a fresh image, here's the 18 step procedure I followed. 

I have a little sysadmin skill but I've never used multistrap or other esoteric build tools.

I boooted the new image and got as far as the console login. I stopped there and thought I'd send these instructions on in case anyone wants a crack at the procedure over the weekend, before the hackfest. 

What do you think? 

Nick Hardiman
nick at internetmachines.co.uk
@intmachines

Get ready

1.	Start your workstation. 
2.	Use a Debian Wheezy OS (my host is called cms01). A virtual image, such as a VirtualBox image, is fine. Usually.
3.	Use the root account. 

Prepare an SD card. 

4.	Find a microSD card with SD card holder. It must be at least 2GB in size. 
5.	Insert the card into your workstation. 
6.	Install a partition editor.  Install parted if you are a masochist.
apt-get install parted
7.	Create 2 partitions.  Use cfdisk, parted, gparted or similar.
cfdisk  /dev/sdb
a.	First partition: 128meg (no smaller or the kernel copy will run out of room and make - see below - will end with an error).
b.	Second partition: 2GB (more or less, it doesn't matter).
8.	Make a note of the SD card’s device name. Mine is /dev/sdb (my workstation’s layout is simple: one disk called /dev/sda and nothing else defined). 
9.	Format the two partitions. 
a.	First partition: FAT
mkdosfs /dev/sdb1
b.	Second partition: ext3
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb2
10.	Create a mountpoint on your workstation. 
mkdir /media/freedom
11.	Mount the second partition.
mount /dev/sdb2 /media/freedom/
12.	Mount the first partition.
mount /dev/sdb1 /media/freedom/boot/
13.	Check your work. 
root at cms01:/media/freedom# mount 
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
…
/dev/sdb2 on /media/freedom type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=continue,barrier=1,data=ordered)
/dev/sdb1 on /media/freedom/boot type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=utf8,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
root at cms01:/media/freedom# 

Clone the git repository. 

14.	Install git.
root at cms01:~# apt-get install git
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  git-man liberror-perl rsync
Suggested packages:
  git-daemon-run git-daemon-sysvinit git-doc git-el git-arch git-cvs git-svn
  git-email git-gui gitk gitweb
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  git git-man liberror-perl rsync
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 8,086 kB of archives.
After this operation, 15.3 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
Get:1 http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ wheezy/main liberror-perl all 0.17-1 [23.6 kB]
…
root at cms01:~# 
15.	Clone Nick Daly’s repository.
root at cms01:~# git clone https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker.git
Cloning into 'freedom-maker'...
remote: Counting objects: 377, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (174/174), done.
remote: Total 377 (delta 193), reused 366 (delta 182)
Receiving objects: 100% (377/377), 46.40 MiB | 175 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (193/193), done.
root at cms01:~#

Create the Debian OS.

16.	Install tools. 
apt-get install multistrap qemu-user-static u-boot-tools git mercurial
Even though this is mentioned in the Makefile, I had to manually install to avoid the error 
./mk_dreamplug_rootfs: line 72: multistrap: command not found
17.	Change to the new directory. 
root at cms01:~# cd /root/freedom-maker/
root at cms01:~/freedom-maker#
18.	Kick off. 
make weekly-card

The next part took about an hour, but required no input from me. Packages were downloaded. Commands like this were run.
...
apt-get  -o Apt::Architecture=armel -o Dir::Etc::TrustedParts=/root/freedom-maker/build/dreamplug/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d -o Dir::Etc::Trusted=/root/freedom-maker/build/dreamplug/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/trusted.gpg -o Apt::Get::Download-Only=true -o Apt::Install-Recommends=false -o Dir=/root/freedom-maker/build/dreamplug/ -o Dir::Etc=/root/freedom-maker/build/dreamplug/etc/apt/ -o APT::Default-Release=* -o Dir::State=/root/freedom-maker/build/dreamplug/var/lib/apt/ -o Dir::State::Status=/root/freedom-maker/build/dreamplug/var/lib/dpkg/status -o Dir::Cache=/root/freedom-maker/build/dreamplug/var/cache/apt/ update
...
What does that mean? I don’t know. 

Errors like this occurred. 
...
Setting up sysvinit (2.88dsf-22.1) ...
sysvinit: creating /run/initctl
sysvinit: restarting...init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl
.init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl
.init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl
.init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl
.init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl
.init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl
.init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl
.init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl
 failed.
...
What does that mean? I still don’t know. 

There was good news like this.
...
Multistrap system installed successfully in /root/freedom-maker/build/dreamplug/.

Copying the source directory to the FreedomBox root.
...

There was an enormous amount of this.
...
bin/bash
      818092 100%    7.07MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=1102/1123)
bin/cat
       42736 100%  362.91kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=1101/1123)
bin/chgrp
       54996 100%  383.62kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#3, to-check=1100/1123)
...

This stuff runs on and on for thousands of lines, until
…
var/log/prosody/prosody.err
         402 100%    0.90kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#31612, to-check=4/40089)
var/log/prosody/prosody.log
         859 100%    1.92kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#31613, to-check=3/40089)
var/mail/
var/opt/
var/spool/
var/spool/mail -> ../mail
var/spool/rsyslog/
var/tmp/
var/www/
var/www/index.html
         177 100%    0.40kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#31614, to-check=0/40089)

sent 295603363 bytes  received 632817 bytes  1145981.35 bytes/sec
total size is 593183522  speedup is 2.00
...

File copying seems to have finished. Then it’s onto the kernel.
...
cp kernel/* /media/freedom/boot/
cp build/dreamplug/boot/* /media/freedom/boot/
sudo rm /media/freedom/sbin/copy2dream

This won’t work. My SD card is device sdb, not sdc.
...
sudo sh -c "sed -e 's/sdc1/sda1/g' < source/etc/fstab > /media/freedom/etc/fstab"
sync
sleep 1
umount /media/freedom/boot
umount /media/freedom
Build complete.
...

Finally an image is copied and zipped up.
...
dd if=/dev/sdb of="freedombox-unstable_`date +%Y.%m%d`.img" bs=1M
3781+1 records in
3781+1 records out
3965190144 bytes (4.0 GB) copied, 266.174 s, 14.9 MB/s
Image copied.  The microSD card may now be removed.
tar -cjvf "freedombox-unstable_`date +%Y.%m%d`.tar.bz2" "freedombox-unstable_`date +%Y.%m%d`.img"
freedombox-unstable_2012.0705.img
root at cms01:~/freedom-maker#

The end. Hooray! The SD card is ready for the DreamPlug. 