Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Alix board debian installation 2

So, here are my notes for installation.

Hardware
Using the Decisio casing, I can easily mount an internal 2,5" IDE on the 44-pin IDE header. But don't forget to jumper the drive for slave! I couldn't boot my first Alix for an hour before I remembered this. And to make things worse, I forgot again on the second Alix. Finding jumpers that fit a 2,5" IDE drive can be a hassle: they're really tiny.

Preparing the filesystem
First of, I used ext2 instead of ext3: I don't see the need for a journal on CF especially since it is only 4Gb in size.

Secondly, the use of tune2fs to reduce filesystem checks makes sense, but the behaviour of fsck.ext2 has changed recently. It used to not force disk with a timestamp in the past, but it has reverted this. It only doesn't do this anymore with timestamps in the 1970 region (the unix epoc), but it seems Alix has an epoch of 2000. In practise this means that when Alix boots, the time is in the past (as there is no battery backed-up RTC) and a check will always be done.
I haven't found a solution yet.

Configuring the base system
The original instructions mentioned a /dev/sda1 for the fstab. Actually Alix only has old-fashioned IDE ports, so this should read /dev/hda1.

Disabling unneeded drivers
Add "blacklist pcspkr" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Networking
The default Debian Lenny kernel doesn't seem to recognize the ethernet ports. At least in my case I only got eth1 up. If this happens to you to, update to 2.6.30 (which currently can be found in unstable). This worked for my first Alix (in progress for Alix nr. 2 as we speak).

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