Software for 3100

[Ralph Siemsen]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 05:42:44PM -0500, Andrew E. Mileski wrote:

> The kernel has to be 2 MB or less I believe.  Just ext2, drive
> controller driver, and serial port drivers built-in with the rest as
> modules.  The boot partition has to be ext2 formatted with no attributes
> and such.

I was rather suprised to discover, during my recent experiment with
Debian Etch on the CrusoeWinder, that both ext3 and the various
filesystem attributes seem to work just fine with firmware v1.12.
Perhaps it was just lucky co-incidence, or cosmic rays, but it
surprised me sufficiently to make a note about it.

Andrew's advice certainly holds true on the ARM-based models though.
I've lost count of how many times I've had to re-format a drive there
after having forgotten to disable "sparse_super" flag etc.

I was able to format a hard drive on my Fedora 8 desktop machine,
using nothing more than "mke2fs -j /dev/sdbX", then pop the drive 
into the CrusoeWinder.  The only issue seems to be the kernel size.
And ensuring it is compiled for i586 rather than i686 or beyond :)

I've still got the minimal disk image for Debian Etch, including the
custom built kernel image, if anyone is interested.  I did not build
the kernel "the Debian way", but that's fairly minor issue.

-R