This is a clone of the buildroot repository with Novena laptop build support.
For more information on this hardware:

  http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page

The base (buildroot rootfs) support is relatively cleanly implemented (make
novena_config), though incomplete (eg, missing DMA drivers, complete PCIe
support).

This file, however, describes how to build a complete bootable image file with
a debian rootfs, build with polystrap (based on multistrap). The polystrap
scripts are included in this repo (see polystrap/README), but the multistrap
tools and fakeroot/fakechroot/qemu must be installed on the host system (which
pretty much assumes a debian-based host). Like buildroot, this system allows a
full build as a non-root user, with the exception that two target-platform-arch
binaries (fake(ch)root .so libraries, for armhf in this case) must be installed
on the host system in privileged locations. The hack below describes how to do
this by collecting the binary files from debian packages themselves, which
perhaps makes this hack less agregious to those with freedom/security concerns.

DISCLAIMERS:

  * Work in Progress, assume zero reliability or security
  * multistrap does not validated apt packages from inside fakeroot
  * current images have null password root login
  * current images run sshd with passwordless root login
  * u-boot has pointy corners; eg, building outside of a git repository
    required hacks
  * most buildroot sources are fetched over non-https connections and are not
    even checksummed

As a pre-requisit, need to install the following packages (assuming debian
host):

  sudo apt-get install fakeroot fakechroot multistrap openssl qemu-user-static

Setup polystrap requirements, and build debian rootfs:

1. cd ./polystrap
2. run ./polystrap.sh novena; it will fail. you need to copy the fakeroot and
   fakechroot libraries for the *target* architecture into your *host*
   operating system's path:
     sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf
     sudo cp debian-wheezy-armhf-*/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/fakechroot/libfakechroot.so debian-wheezy-armhf-*/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libfakeroot/libfakeroot-sysv.so /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/
3. rm -rf debian-wheezy-armhf-*
4. ./polystrap.sh novena   # ignore the final warning from tar
5. mkdir -p ../output/images
6. cp debian-wheezy-armhf-*.tar ../output/images/debian-rootfs.tar

Build kernel, u-boot, and final images:

1. make novena_debian_config
2. make menuconfig # (saving output)
3. make