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 6.0.1a or ubuntu 10.04.02 LTS 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 VirtualBox

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 ubuntu 10.04.02 LTS and debian 6.0.1a on a 386 VM (using virtualbox). Also some tests have been done on Sheevaplug and OpenRD client

Installation using an image file

to be written

Installation using prebuilt packages

Currently this is only supported on 32bit. Testing is mostly done with Ubuntu 10.04

You need to install Debian or Ubuntu 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 Debian on 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 Ubuntu I used 10.04LTS 32 bit desktop edition but others have reported success with others 10.04 variants. 11.04 seems to have some issues. For now development focus is on 10.04 as it is an LTS.

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 or with the sudo command:

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.

Note: on arm it might be that mysql initialisation is not completely done when hdactl is started. You can see that if ps ax | grep hdactl only gives one hdactl process and your grep task. In that case kill the hdactl task and start hdactl manually (with /etc/init.d/hdactl start)

Installation using the sources

Note: the procedure below describes how to generate the packages from the sources. This procedure requires the amahi git. However at the moment there are several patches pending to be committed. While generating will work, there are probably some issues present that are fixed in the binary version.

  • Install debian. If you install mysql do not give it a root password.
  • on this system perform the following steps:
  • wget http://amahi.99k.org/buildit
  • sh buildit

Note that the script now requires root access

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

  • echo "deb file:/root/amahirepo ./" >>/etc/apt/sources.list
  • apt-get update
  • apt-get --force-yes -y install hda-platform
  • hda-install your-install-code

where your-install-code is the code you obtain from www.amahi;org

Note that the echo line modifying sources.list only needs to do once. Also you need to adapt the path to the place where your repo dir is. If you ran as root it will probably be the location I gave.

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