Debian

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This page is being edited actively and a lot of sections are missing currently; feel free to help improving it.

Note that there is still an issue when installing. Apparently for me the install bails out halfway because the network settings are gone. If you fix these (by telling to use dhcp in /etc/network/interfaces) and rerun the installer things install fine for me.

Current state

Amahi can be installed and made running on Debian. However the code is still not very mature and not many applications have been tested. Also it is not as smooth to install things as it is with the Fedora version.

This page describes how to get things working. Note that due to the immature state of the code installing it is mainly interested for people who want to get a feeling of it, help in testing and resolving issues.

PS: this page was started by a non-native English speaker. Feel free to clean up the language or improve and clarify instructions.

Known Issues

Feel free to add issues here. If you add an issue an email to the amahi developers list with a more detailed description and/or a bug report in our bugzilla is also greatly appreciated.

  • The default debian browser (ephipany if I recall correctly) will not indicate progress while installing
  • Apache status is not displayed correctly in servers tab
  • only a few packages are available (if any) I tested phpsysinfo, hello-world and wakkiwiki. Not sure what is available to others and what has been assigned to me as tester.

Requirements

  • A system to install things on. This system must support debian and have the needed resources. I've assumed the system has a network connection, but it will undoubtly be possible to get things working with an installation disk and some data transfer with USB disks.
  • Some experience in installing things. This also depends on the way you want to install things (see below)
  • Ambition to help improving things and a lot of tolerance against problems; The current version is far from finished.

Tested platforms

This section lists the platforms on which this was tested. Feel free to add your platform.

  • OpenRD Client (primary development platform, armv5tel)
  • SheevaPlug (same SoC as OpenRD Client, but more readily available)
  • x86 virtual machine under Xen.

Installation

Currenty there are three different ways to install the system. They are listed in order of difficulty, simplest first, most difficult but most flexible last. Note that the last two ways assume that you install Debian yourself.

Please note that is is far from complete so do not attempt to install this:

  • on systems with other valuable data
  • if you feel uncomfortable with Linux
  • if you have a low threshold against bugs

Most of this was tested on SheevaPlug and OpenRD client. Some tests have also been done on an x86 virtual machine under Xen.

Installation using an image file

to be written

Installation using prebuilt packages

Currently this is only supported on i386 (32bit) intel and on arm little endian (armel) hardware and only tested on armv5tel.

You need to install debian on your platform. No special packages are needed. E.g. when installing on a system without a display there is no need to install a graphical desktop.

For PC I used this guide: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ and used this iso: http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-6.0.1a-i386-netinst.iso

For SheevaPlug I used this guide: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html

There are two things to keep in mind: When being asked for a mysql root password, leave the password empty (actually you will get this question more than once).
For any question you get just hit return.

Then perform the following steps while logged in as root:

Where yourinstallcode is an install code you generated on www.amahi.org

Note, while installing you will face a long wait after the message "install code looks good" and after "initializing plugin factory"

When done, reboot the system and open a browser to http://hda The system will ask you to log in, use the user that you created while installing debian. Note that after log in amahi will force you to change the password of that user to a different (!) password.

Installation using the sources

  • Install debian. If you install mysql do not give it a root password.
  • on this system perform the following steps:
  • install the needed development packages apt-get install build-essential devscripts debhelper fakeroot lintian git-core
  • clone the amahi git repository: git clone git://git.amahi.org/amahi.git
  • cd amahi/platform/hdactl
  • get the debian specifc hda-install: 'wget http://amahi.99k.org/hda-install (this one will move to a location on amahi.org)
  • build the hdactl package by typing make deb
  • build the hda-platform package by typing cd ../platform; make deb
  • create a local package feed by doing the following:
  • cd ../..; mkdir repo; cd repo
  • cp ../platform/*/release/*.deb . (don't forget the dot at the end!)
  • create the Packages file: dpkg-scanpackages -m . /dev/null > Packages
  • and compress it: gzip Packages

You have now build your packages. you now can install the packages by performing the following steps:

  • echo "deb file:/root/repo ./" >>/etc/apt/sources.list
  • apt-get update
  • apt-get --force-yes -y install hda-platform
  • hda-install $1
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