Slackware live image for iMX233-OLinuXino

[guanx]

Hi,

For anyone who wants to try Slackware Linux on iMX233-OLinuXino, this is the live system I use at home --

microSD Image: http://rpc.suroot.com/slackwarearm-live/imx233-olinuxino-sd.img.xz
Readme: http://rpc.suroot.com/slackwarearm-live/imx233-olinuxino-sd.img.xz.README.txt
root password: darkstar

Everything including source: http://rpc.suroot.com/slackwarearm-live/

guanx

[Gargablegar]

How would you run this off the SD card and not in "Live mode"

Or at least how do you increase the partition, I cant install any packages because there is only 20M of system space.

[guanx]

Summary: This slackwarearm image is made to run in live mode in order to:

1) increase the Micro-SD card's life;
2) allow poweroff / reset of a running system without damage.

The second point is mandatory for embedded systems. Sadly, I am not aware of any other distro image that takes this into account, so I made this live image of slackwareare available for download.


This image is intended to be used in "Live mode" off the SD card, not like other widely available images that run ON the SD card.
Micro-SD cards make use of short-lived flash technology, and don't have proper wear leveling. Running a Linux system that mounts the Micro-SD read / write all time will more likely cause problems than mounting the Micro-SD read-only. I published this image in order to address this issue. Therefore, the filesystem structure is as the following:

[Union File-system: AUFS]
tmpfs[rw] -- over -- squashfs[ro] for /lib/{firmware,modules} -- over -- squashfs[ro] for rootfs

/dev/mmcblk0p1: bootstream
/dev/mmcblk0p2: squashfs for /lib/{firmware,modules}
/dev/mmcblk0p3: squashfs for rootfs
/dev/mmcblk0p4: nilfs2 for changes

See details in the ReadMe file in my first post.

The 20MB free space you see is the tmpfs, the read/write branch of the aufs.
You can enlarge this tmpfs in the init script in "initrd.cpio", which can be downloaded from the same place as the Micro-SD image.
However, anything you installed to that is likely to be lost after reboot.
To install new packages, take out the Micro-SD card and connect it to your computer. Copy out its third partition:

mount -t squashfs /dev/sdX3 /mnt # where sdX is the device node of your Micro-SD
rsync -aAHX /mnt . # Use unsquashfs in case your kernel doesn't support squashfs-lz4
umount /mnt
export ROOT=`pwd`/mnt
installpkg path-to-your-new-slackware-package.tgz
rm -f rootfs.squashfs
mksquashfs mnt rootfs.squashfs -comp lz4 -Xhc
dd if=rootfs.squashfs of=/dev/sdX3 bs=1M

Then put the Micro-SD back into your imx233-olinuxino.

[guanx]

This slackwarearm system image has been updated to Linux 3.14.18, squashfs-lz4, and has the most recent slackwarearm security patches included.