User manual

9 Debian Installation

9. Debian Installation

The installation of the Debian 5.0.3 Lenny

will be described in this section. The installation

instructions for other Debian versions are similar with this one. Your system should meet the

following requirements:

• BIOS 2.6 or later

• Serial Terminal (Emulation) at 115200bps, 8N1

• Installation source: CD/DVD-ROM on USB or Windows share (Samba)

• Installation target: CompactFlash card or USB Mass Storage device

Due to the fact that OnRISC is not oﬃcially supported by arm-debian port there is no suitable

kernel in the distribution. So you have to provide boot image ﬁles to the OnRISC to be able to

start the Debian installer. These ﬁles (see the description below) can be downloaded from our SVN

repository.

Generally two types of Debian installer are provided:

• CD-ROM Installer

• Network Installer

For Debian 4.0 Etch you’ll ﬁnd only CD-ROM Installer etch/initrd.gz. For Debian 5.0 Lenny

both installer are supplied lenny/initrd.gz-cdrom and lenny/initrd.gz-net. The desired in-

staller must be renamed to initrd.gz when copying to a mass storage device or Windows share.

You can get the latest install DVDs at http://www.debian.org/distrib/

9.1. Preparing Boot Image Files

Copy the downloaded ﬁles to the root directory of your USB mass storage device. These ﬁles are:

• initrd.gz - RAM disk image with Debian Installer

• zImage - Linux kernel

• kparam - Kernel parameter like root=/dev/ram describing that kernel should use RAM disk

as root ﬁlesystem (refer to Section 3.1.1)

Alternatively you can use a Windows share (Samba) (see Figure 18). It can be made in four steps:

1. create shared folder. For example D:\shared folders\bootdir (see Figure 18a)

2. copy the image ﬁles to this folder (see Figure 18b)

3. enter BIOS and set the Network Parameter (see 8.4)

4. conﬁgure your BIOS to access the network share directory (see 8.3)

For detailed information about Debian Installation visit http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/arm

1GB or more recommended

May 2014 OnRISC User Manual 60