[Server-devel] xsce on cubox comments

[Tim Moody]

I have been thinking about setting up xsce on the cubox and am asking for comments.

I would like the cubox to boot on its sdcard and be a viable computer.

I would like it to have the ability to put the rootfs onto an external drive, preferably esata.

I would like the boot process to select an external rootfs if it finds one otherwise the sd card.

I propose the following:

We have an sd card with a minimal fedora with boot, root, and I guess swap (it has it now).  The target would be a 4G card.

We have an image of the rootfs for the external drive either on the sdcard or on a usb stick that can be mounted.  This image for now would just be a minimal fedora on which to run ansible, but could ultimately include the entire xsce install.

A script creates swap, root, and possibly library partitions on an external disk (for now let’s say it is run on demand)
It then dd copies the rootfs file to the root partition.
It then fixes up fstab on the root partition with the uuids of the partitions to mount.  (Are there other things to fix up?)

At boot time U-boot looks for a rootfs partition on the external drive, say sda3 by convention, (I’m not sure how it recognizes one) and sets the argument in bootcmd to that or else the sdcard if an external partition is not found.

The cubox publishes its ip address as the name of a bluetooth service so we know where to connect if we don’t have a serial console or an hdmi device.  (after xsce is installed it would publish its wan ip and its fqdn)

Later there might be a web server on the minimal sdcard image which provides a graphical interface to further configuration.

Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/attachments/20140319/b32d1a39/attachment.html>