This is how I installed Debian Wheezy on Netgear Stora.
The following how-to is mostly a copypaste from various sources:
- http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,5986,page=1
- http://www.openstora.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_install_Debian_Linux_on_NETGEAR_Stora
- https://github.com/johnou/debian_stora_kernel
You will need:
- Netgear Stora
- USB stick (the system will be running from it — so it should be fast enough)
- Serial console access
First prepare your USB stick. Create an ext2 partition and label it as root.
Download rootfs image and unpack it to your flash drive.
Connect serial cable to your Stora. Power on the unit, press any key when you see Hit any key to stop autoboot and enter:
setenv mainlineLinux yes
setenv arcNumber 2743
setenv bootcmd_usb 'usb reset; ext2load usb 0 0x200000 /boot/uImage; ext2load usb 0 0x800000 /boot/uInitrd'
setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(console) root=LABEL=root rootdelay=8; run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x200000 0x800000'
saveenv
reset
Stora will reboot and Debian will start. Default root password: 111222.
You can build your own rootfs if you want. You will need Debian or Ubuntu machine for this.
First, you need to install debootstrap, create an img-file for the rootfs (1GB should be fine) and mount it
sudo -s
apt-get install debootstrap
dd if=/dev/zero of=debian_rootfs.img bs=1M count=1024
mkfs.ext3 -F debian_rootfs.img
mkdir /media/debian
mount debian_rootfs.img /media/debian -o loop
Now let's run the first stage of debootstrap and get Debian Wheezy armel port
debootstrap --verbose --arch=armel --variant=minbase --foreign wheezy /media/debian http://cdn.debian.net/debian/
The output should look like this. With the aid of Binfmt_misc we are able to chroot into armel rootfs on a x86 machine.
apt-get install binfmt-support qemu-user-static
modprobe binfmt_misc
cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static /media/debian/usr/bin
mkdir /media/debian/dev/pts
mount devpts /media/debian/dev/pts -t devpts
mount -t proc proc /media/debian/proc
chroot /media/debian/
If you see something like "I have no name!@hostname:/#", you're inside. Let's proceed with the second stage of debootstrap
/debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
The output should look like this. At the end you should see
I: Base system installed successfully.
Now we can start installing necessary packages and configuring our rootfs. But before we must add the package sources.
cat <<END > /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian wheezy main
deb-src http://cdn.debian.net/debian wheezy main
deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian wheezy-updates main
deb-src http://cdn.debian.net/debian wheezy-updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main
END
apt-get update
At this point it's a good idea to configure the language settings
exit
mount devpts /media/debian/dev/pts -t devpts
mount -t proc proc /media/debian/proc
chroot /media/debian/
export LANG=C
apt-get install apt-utils
apt-get install dialog
apt-get install locales
cat <<END > /etc/apt/apt.conf
APT::Install-Recommends "0";
APT::Install-Suggests "0";
END
dpkg-reconfigure locales
If you need English only, just select en_US.UTF-8 in both dialogs and run
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
after that. Don't select encodings other than UTF-8. For other languages, select en_US.UTF-8 and the appropriate locale for your language (xx_YY.UTF-8). For example, if you speak French, select en_US.UTF-8 and fr_FR.UTF-8 in the first dialog and choose fr_FR.UTF-8 in the second dialog. After that run
export LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8
This way Debian will speak your mother tongue. The output shoud look like this.
It's time to install the kernel. You can build your own kernel if you want.
cd /root
rm -f /etc/blkid.tab
ln -s /dev/null /etc/blkid.tab
rm -f /etc/mtab
ln -s /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
apt-get install wget ca-certificates initramfs-tools uboot-mkimage
wget https://github.com/kirov/stora-debian-kernel/releases/download/v3.10.26/linux-image-3.10.26-stora_1_armel.deb
wget https://github.com/kirov/stora-debian-kernel/releases/download/v3.10.26/linux-headers-3.10.26-stora_1_armel.deb
dpkg -i linux-image-3.10.26-stora_1_armel.deb
dpkg -i linux-headers-3.10.26-stora_1_armel.deb
We need to generate uBoot and uInitrd
mkimage -A arm -O linux -T kernel -C none -a 0x00008000 -e 0x00008000 -n Linux-3.10.26-stora -d /boot/vmlinuz-3.10.26-stora /boot/uImage
mkimage -A arm -O linux -T ramdisk -C gzip -a 0x00000000 -e 0x00000000 -n initramfs-3.10.26-stora -d /boot/initrd.img-3.10.26-stora /boot/uInitrd
Install more packages
apt-get install kmod dhcp3-client udev netbase ifupdown iproute openssh-server iputils-ping net-tools ntpdate vim nano
Now we are going to reproduce some basic configuration steps. Starting with network configuration
cat <<END > /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo eth0
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp
END
Setup machine's name (in this case it will be "stora")
echo stora > /etc/hostname
Activate remote console and disable local consoles
echo 'T0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 115200 linux' >> /etc/inittab
sed -i 's/^\([1-6]:.* tty[1-6]\)/#\1/' /etc/inittab
Disable RAMTMP
echo RAMTMP=no >> /etc/default/rcS
echo RAMSHM=no >> /etc/default/rcS
echo RAMLOCK=no >> /etc/default/rcS
Finally, set root password
passwd
Now we're done here
exit
umount /media/debian/proc
umount /media/debian/dev/pts
That's it. You can now copy the files to your USB flash and run Debian on Stora.