Sidux Installation
Sidux is a Debian/Sid based distribution. It is one of the few distributions based on Debian that give back substantial feedback to the project. You can use Debian Installation to get a current kernel or you may install Sidux. With sidux there is plenty of free RAM and the IL1 ist fast and responsive, just as puppy-linux but unlike ubuntu 8.04 preinst. Just install sidux from stick and throw in the VGA driver. Takes 20 minutes.
Sidux can be a big space saver: if you use "fromiso persist" boot option, you use up only ~ 400 MB from the 2GB internal space, but have a full extensible system.
just make an USB stick with the usb-installer tool inside sidux. then copy the stuff manually to sda1 and do grub-install. also replace the uuid in /boot/grub/menu.lst with /dev/sda1/ to point to SSD instead of the usb-stick eventally. too bad, none of the VGA drivers work with latest sidux-lite 4/2008. But the VX800 drivers will move into the kernel. however, the WLAN is supported by sidux-4-2008.
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Preparation
- Back up your A110 SSD!
- You need a bootable USB-drive — either CD-ROM or an USB stick.
- Make sure you have a LAN-connection to the Internet.
Steps
- Download the current "Lite"-version of Sidux.
- Bring this to the bootable media (e.g. on your desktop PC: burn the CD and use the "Install to USB" function to copy it to your USB drive - attention: contents will be lost).
- After the backup (don't forget) - do a stock install of Sidux (takes approx. 15 minutes). This should work without any problem. Sidux runs like a charm on the A110 - except the known driver problems.
- When you've rebooted your machine into the new installation, login as root on console and fire up smxi - follow all steps on the screen. Add additional sources for apt, install the new kernel. After the installation of the new kernel I did a reboot (offered by smxi) - I dont know if this is needed.
- If you did the reboot, start smxi again.
- copy the driver from One VGA driver to /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers . You'll have to change your xorg.conf to use this driver - see LCD.
- I installed the kernel from One as boot option. Wireless will not work correctly with this kernel (at least for me --Helmar Wodtke 13:33, 5 June 2008 (UTC)).
Using Another Kernel
the latest sidux has system/sidux control center to take care of latest kernels & stuff
- Copy the bzImage or vmlinuz to /boot .
- Copy all modules to /lib/modules/your-kernel-xxxx , where "your-kernel-xxxx" is your specific kernel version (it should be this way in the archive or other source where you have it from)
- Simply change the menu.lst in /boot/grub :
- copy the menu entry for the default Sidux kernel
- change the kernel image to your bzImage or vmlinuz (Do not touch the initrd!)
- Try to reboot.
Small Modifications
- If you want to see the penguin at startup, use the option vga=786 for the kernel.
flash protection
in order to avoid excessive writes to flash media, Linux-from-flash-memory must take measures not not wear down the memory to soon. is yet unclear whether the IL1 flash chips have builtin wear levelling. [1]
make sure there is no "ro" grub kernel parameter
- /etc/fstab have noatime option active (no access-timestamps on files) (Sidux install script from stick does that ext3) mount -o noatime,nodiratime
- do not swap to builtin flash (fstab)
- echo 64 >/sys/block/sdb/device/max_sectors // or some other value small enough
- use appropriate fs jffs,yaffs
- otherwise use ext2 but not ext3 since ext3 wastes time and io for it's journalling
- puppy linux 4.1.1 is best suited for this purpose and runs from read-only usb-sticks too.
in sidux, ext2fs, nodiratime, and tmpfs were employed successfully. it leaves appr. 500M free of those internal drive's 2 GB. sidux is much faster than the preinstalled ubuntu 8.04 by one.de .
if smxi is not working for you, use siduxcc in textmode.
Results
- WLAN - works using ndiswrapper -
- Cardreader - working (with kernel from One or the kernel module from SD) -
- Xorg - works -
- Sound - works -
recap
if you are in a hurry, this is what you need to do to get a fresh Linux onto the IL1:
- boot IL1 with latest sidux-lite from usb-stick and use installer to hd ( = SSD )
- throw in the VGA driver as shown above (you may want to keep the autogenerated xorg.conf for better resolution switching)
- in 20 minutes or so you can be done with all that
- make a backup, which shortens a future restore op. to 15 minutes fixed.
