I haven’t post on my blog for quite some time now. But I began the new year by resuming my work on embedded devices. This time is about installing Frugalware on a Raspberry Pi.

The first step is to properly partionning your SD card. The Raspberry Pi bootloader can boot only from a FAT32 partition, so we need one. Also we need another partition to contain our Frugalware installation and optionnally a swap partition. As an example, I have the following.

Disk /dev/sdb: 31.9 GB, 31914983424 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 30436 cylinders, total 62333952 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f1e37

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048      749567      373760    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb2          749568     2846719     1048576   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb3         2846720    62332927    29743104   83  Linux

Now mount your linux partition (in my case /dev/sdb3) and the FAT partition (/dev/sdb1) as “/boot” and extract the following tarball into it.

Another solution is to perform a chroot installation but this require another arm device. In this case you need to add the repo armkernels and install the proper kernel for the Raspberry-pi from it (named kernel-raspberrypi). Otherwise follow the instructions provided here. Copy the content of your boot directory to the FAT partition (or mount your FAT partition as the /boot one before performing the installation). Finally, add a file named “cmdline.txt” into the FAT partition to specify the kernel boot commands like this :

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p3 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait

NB: In my case, my linux partition is the third one (/dev/sdb3) and is of type ext4, so I used “root=/dev/mmcblk0p3 rootfstype=ext4”.

PS: I will upload the script used to create the tarball here as soon as I get internet back @ home.