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.

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 (konquerer 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 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.

There are two things to keep in mind: When being asked for a mysql root password, leave the password empty (actually you might get this question more than once). Also I opted for automatically start hddtemp.

Then perform the following steps:

  • get repo.tar.gz: wget amahi.99k.org/repo.tar.gz (location will change)
  • untar it: tar xvf repo.tar.gz'
  • modify /etc/apt/sources.list. Add a line like: echo deb file:/root ./ >> /etc/apt/sources.list. The dir after file: should be the place where you unpacked the tarball (or if you generated the packages yourself where you issued the dpkg-scanpackages command)
  • apt-get update
  • apt-get -y install hda-platform; say y to the questions. Note that this may take quite a while.
  • when done, reboot the system
  • after rebooting open a browser (this may be on a different system) and go to http://yourmachine-ip:2000 where yourmachine-ip is the ip address of your amahi debian system. It is recommended to use firefox as everything is tested with it. Konquerer does not seem to update progress on the installation
  • insert your installation code and hit start. This will take a substantial time (especially when at 9% it says installing packages.
  • when done without error, reboot.
  • next refresh the ip address of your client and (so your hda is added to your /etc/resolv.conf) and browse to http://hda/setup to set up your hda.

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)
  • check debian/hdactl.hdactl.init; if it contains a string mysqld remove the trailing d
  • 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 can install things like explained in the previous section, skipping the first two steps.

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