Installing Debian Lenny on an Alix 3D3 using your NSLU2

After having a bit of a nightmare getting any kind of live-system to boot on any mac in my flat (usb, cd etc), I realised that little sluggy which my brand new PC Engines board is due to, well not replace (particularly in my heart), but help out a little bit, was still faithfully sitting there.

The load average as usual was around 3-something, so this wasn't going to be that quick, but a hell of a lot more rewarding than burning coasters. So here we go:

umount /dev/sdb1

Then unplug your secondary disk from your slug for a bit. The 2nd half of Gladiator was going to have to wait.

fdisk /dev/sdc
d
1
n
1
b
w

e.g. delete the silly FAT partition, create a nice new linux one and write it.

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdc1
tune2fs -c 0 /dev/sdc1

Make yourself an ext3 partition that won't get checked all the time.

Now slightly trickier, you're on a different CPU architecture, so you'll need this debootstrap command:

debootstrap --verbose --arch i386 --foreign lenny /mnt/cf http://ftp.debian.org/debian/

I love the way debootstrap doesn't exit with any message at all unless you use --verbose !

Right, now it really gets interesting... you weren't planning to run any of those i386 binaries on your arm were you?

Wait for part 2, tomorrow!