Freedom-Maker - Bdale's building tools for the FreedomBox project Welcome to the FreedomBox! This project is the central hub of the FreedomBox project, it builds and installs the file-system image that turns any computer into a FreedomBox. There are a couple ways to use this system: 1. If you just want to use a FreedomBox and don't care about changing how it works or mucking about in its insides (if you're like most people), you should get a pre-built image from someone and copy it to an SD card or USB drive. If you don't have a JTAG or don't know what one is, make sure to ask for the SD card image. 2. If you want to change and build on it, you can use: A. A USB stick. This requires a JTAG, but doesn't require opening up the DreamPlug, or, B. A microSD card and adapter. You can use the one from inside the DreamPlug. You won't need a JTAG, but you will need to open the DreamPlug and void the warranty. *** *** Warning! There are no "training wheels" here .. read the scripts and *** understand what they're going to do before you run them... *** # Recent Firmware Necessary! Modern kernels need a relatively recent version of the u-boot firmware. If you still use old firmware (including what Global Scale ships on the units by default), then you need to update, which requires having the JTAG dongle (to gain console serial port access). One way to know you've got old firmware is if booting a Linux kernel results in errors about corrupt gzip data and a failure to launch the kernel. Note that re-flashing firmware will erase all configuration variables. If preserving your exising boot config is important, use printenv and make notes before proceeding. Also note that any time you're re-flashing boot firmware, there is a slight chance you could 'brick' your device leaving it unbootable. If that happens, the JTAG interface can be used to recover. The instructions for updating firmaware go something like this (thanks to Ian Campbell for his notes): Using 2012.04.01-2 which is current Wheezy. Prep by mounting a USB stick. wget http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main/u/u-boot/u-boot_2012.04.01-2_armel.deb dpkg-deb -x u-boot_2012.04.01-2_armel.deb u-boot_2012.04.01-2_armel cp u-boot_2012.04.01-2_armel/usr/lib/u-boot/dreamplug/* /media/usbdisk Move the USB stick to your DreamPlug. Flash the new firmare: usb start fatload usb 2 0x6400000 u-boot.kwb sf probe 0 sf erase 0x0 0x80000 sf write 0x6400000 0x0 0x${filesize} (You must, of course, fill in the size of the file you're loading in hex) At this point, you should be able to reset the DreamPlug and have it boot to a serial console prompt. If that fails, you'll need real JTAG magic to try again. Note that if you use the 'make usb' target to create a bootable USB stick image, we include the required firmware in /boot/dreamplug, so the above fatload command might be replaced with: fatload usb 2 0x6400000 dreamplug/u-boot.kwb # To Use It You'll need to copy the image to the memory card or USB stick: 1. Figure out which device your card actually is. A. Unplug your card. B. Run "df" to show you the list of devices your computer actually knows about. C. Plug your card in. D. Run "df" again, your computer should know about a new device or two: your memory card. It's probably "/dev/sd(someletter)". It *won't be* /dev/sda. 2. Decompress the image: $ tar -xjvf freedombox-unstable_*.tar.bz2 3. Copy the image to your card. Whatever you do, make sure you don't copy it to /dev/sda. That'll break your system. # dd bs=1M if=freedombox-unstable_*.img of=/dev/sd(thesameletter) When picking a device, use the drive-letter destination, like /dev/sdb, not a numbered destination, like /dev/sdb1. The device-without-a-number refers to the entire device, while the device-with-a-number refers to a specific partition. We want to use the whole device. Now, what you need to do depends on whether you're using the microSD card or USB stick method: - USB drive: You'll hook the JTAG up to the DreamPlug before booting and use the JTAG to control the boot process, so we can boot from the USB drive. - microSD card: You'll put the microSD card into the DreamPlug's internal microSD card slot and boot the DreamPlug. It'll restart once to finish the install process, then it's ready to use. ## Running from a microSD Card When DD has finished, take the microSD card out of your computer and plug it into your DreamPlug. If you have a JTAG, you can watch it boot. You'll see it restart once during the boot process. If you don't have a JTAG, wait a while (5 minutes or less) and it'll be available over SSH (port 22). You might need to use nmap to find it: $ nmap -p 22 --open -sV 192.168.0.0/24 ... Interesting ports on 192.168.0.13: PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION 22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 6.0p1 Debian 2 (protocol 2.0) Service Info: OS: Linux ... Once you've found it, SSH into the box: $ ssh root@192.168.0.13 ## Running from a USB Stick Move the USB stick to the DreamPlug, obtain a serial console, and hit reset. A good way to access the serial console (actually USB serial emulation provided by the optional JTAG dongle), is to use 'screen', like so: screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200 Interrupt the boot by pressing a key during the autoboot countdown, and type the following to boot from the USB stick: setenv bootcmd '${x_bootcmd_usb}; ${x_bootcmd_kernel}; ${x_bootcmd_initrd}; setenv bootargs ${x_bootargs} ${x_bootargs_root}; bootm 0x6400000 0x6900000;' setenv x_bootcmd_kernel fatload usb 2 0x6400000 uImage setenv x_bootcmd_initrd fatload usb 2 0x6900000 uInitrd setenv x_bootargs_root root=/dev/sdc2 rootdelay=10 boot The system should boot to a login prompt, using only the bits on the stick. The default root password is 'freedom'. The normal user is "fbx" and the password is "frdm". - - - - - To set things up to boot from the internal microSD card, once you're logged into the system booted from root on USB stick you can use: /sbin/copy2dream Note that if you don't have a reasonable system date and time set in the DreamPlug before running this command, you may see a long stream of warnings from tar about timestamps being in the future. It is safe to ignore these. On reboot, you may want to interrupt the boot and type the following to ensure you boot from the internal microSD by default. This bootcmd line elides the time-consuming attempts to boot grom gigE, which makes boot go much faster: setenv bootcmd '${x_bootcmd_usb}; ${x_bootcmd_kernel}; ${x_bootcmd_initrd}; setenv bootargs ${x_bootargs} ${x_bootargs_root}; bootm 0x6400000 0x6900000;' setenv x_bootcmd_kernel fatload usb 0 0x6400000 uImage setenv x_bootcmd_initrd fatload usb 0 0x6900000 uInitrd setenv x_bootargs_root root=/dev/sda2 rootdelay=10 saveenv reset # To Make It If you want to build your own image yourself, you're more than welcome to. Whether you're using a USB drive or a microSD card, you'll need to ensure that it's at least 2 GB in size and that it has two partitons: 1. The stick must start with a 128 MB FAT partition for the boot directory. 2. The rest of the stick is an EXT2 partition, for the main installation. The rest of the steps you need to follow depend on whether you're using a USB stick or a microSD card. ## Building on a USB Stick Partition a USB stick to have a small FAT partition and large ext2 partition, create a /media/freedom mount point, and add entries to /etc/fstab like: /dev/sdb1 /media/freedom/boot vfat user,noauto 0 0 /dev/sdb2 /media/freedom ext2 user,noauto 0 0 This will allow the Makefile to mount and unmount the stick at will. If you have a favorite Debian mirror, update the file fbx-base.conf setting the source= line. To populate the stick with bits for a DreamPlug, just plug it in to your computer and type: make This will build a file tree under build/dreamplug, representing the contents of a root file system, then that content will be copied to the stick. ## Building it on a microSD card. Changing the image and building your own is a simple 18 step process! Lots of thanks to Nick Hardiman for putting these instructions together. ### Get Ready 1. Start your workstation. 2. Use a Debian OS, the version doesn't matter. A virtual image, such as a VirtualBox image, is fine. Usually. 3. Use the root account. ### Prepare an SD Card 4. Find a microSD card with SD card holder. It must be at least 2GB in size. 5. Insert the card into your workstation. 6. Install a partition editor. Install parted if you are a masochist. # apt-get install parted 7. Create 2 partitions. Use cfdisk, parted, gparted or similar. # cfdisk /dev/sdb a. First partition: 128meg (no smaller or the kernel copy will run out of room and make - see below - will end with an error). b. Second partition: The rest of the card (anything over 600 MB should work). 8. Make a note of the SD card’s device name. Mine is /dev/sdb (my workstation’s layout is simple: one disk called /dev/sda and nothing else defined). 9. Format the two partitions. a. First partition: FAT # mkdosfs /dev/sdb1 b. Second partition: ext3 # mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb2 10. Create the mountpoints on your workstation. # mkdir -p /media/freedom/boot 11. Mount the second partition. # mount /dev/sdb2 /media/freedom/ 12. Mount the first partition. # mount /dev/sdb1 /media/freedom/boot/ 13. Check your work. # mount sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime) ... /dev/sdb2 on /media/freedom type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=continue,barrier=1,data=ordered) /dev/sdb1 on /media/freedom/boot type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=utf8,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro) ### Clone the Git Repository 14. Install git. # apt-get install git Reading package lists... Done ... After this operation, 15.3 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? ... 15. Clone Nick Daly’s repository. $ git clone https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker.git Cloning into 'freedom-maker'... ### Create the Debian OS. 16. Change to the new directory. $ cd ~/freedom-maker/ 17. Kick off: $ make weekly-card 18. Enter your password when asked by "sudo". If that fails, run: $ su -c "make weekly-card" If you do that, you'll need to enter the root password to build the image. The next part took about an hour, but required no input from me. Packages were downloaded. Lots of commands were run. Many harmless errors were ignored: sysvinit: restarting...init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl .init: timeout opening/writing control channel /run/initctl ... There was good news: Multistrap system installed successfully... Copying the source directory to the FreedomBox root. There was an enormous amount of this: bin/bash 818092 100% 7.07MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=1102/1123) bin/cat 42736 100% 362.91kB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=1101/1123) bin/chgrp 54996 100% 383.62kB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#3, to-check=1100/1123) ... Finally an image is copied and zipped up for redistribution: dd if=/dev/sdb of="freedombox-unstable_`date +%Y.%m%d`.img" bs=1M 3781+1 records in 3781+1 records out 3965190144 bytes (4.0 GB) copied, 266.174 s, 14.9 MB/s Image copied. The microSD card may now be removed. tar -cjvf "freedombox-unstable_`date +%Y.%m%d`.tar.bz2" "freedombox-unstable_`date +%Y.%m%d`.img" freedombox-unstable_2012.0705.img The end. Hooray! The SD card is ready for the DreamPlug. # To Understand It Be aware that this is a *very* imcomplete solution for now, suitable only for developers .. you will want to at least do things like create unique ssh host keys for your device! Digging into the code should be fairly straightforward. There are only six files you need to be aware of: - /Makefile: The makefile that describes and builds the system. - /mk_dreamplug_rootfs: Builds the DreamPlug's root file-system. - /bin/projects: The place for external projects to hook into and customize themselves before they're copied to the image. - /bin/finalize: Finalizes and prepares the build for booting. - /source: The root file system. - /source/install.sh: Pre-boot configuration that needs to be run on the device itself (from within a chroot). ## Makefile There are three major targets to be aware of: - dreamstick: The default target. This loads an image to a USB drive that can be used to install the FreedomBox without opening up your DreamPlug and voiding the warranty. You'll need a JTAG, though. - weekly-card: The target used to produce the weekly FreedomBox test release. This will copy the image to a card that can be popped directly into the microSD card slot in the DreamPlug. The DreamPlug will boot happily without needing a JTAG. - stamp-dreamplug-rootfs: The root file system itself. It doesn't get installed anywhere (that's done by the other two targets), but is a good way to test whether the image will actually build, without waiting for all that pesky hardware I/O. ## mk_dreamplug_rootfs Starts building the system by creating all the destination directories and installing the base system. ## /bin/projects Where projects that want to integrate into the FreedomBox should hook into. Keep in mind, we aren't in a chroot at this point. The only environment variables you'll probably need are: - user: The non-root user's name (uid = 1000). - homedir: The non-root user's home-directory. ## /bin/finalize Getting the system ready for boot, doing the things that don't need to be done inside a chroot. You probably don't need to change this. ## /source The root file system on the DreamPlug. Modify this, and you're modifying what ends up on the FreedomBox. ## /source/install.sh This is executed from a chroot during the build process to do configuration that needs to be done on the device itself. You shouldn't need to modify this. If you're installing a project that needs to change how the system configures itself, you're probably doing something wrong.