You need a disk image to hold the operating system, tools, chroots, and such. 2GB is a practical lower limit on size. My buildds have 10GB for multiple choots and leftover buildd trees. Don't forget swap space.
You can download an existing disk image or create one from scratch. Aranym can be configured to use two disk images at a time.
Download from the aranym folks http://wiki.aranym.org/afs/setup_linux#aranym_linuxm68k_resources
Download a 10GB (sparse) etch-m68k image (87M)
- The sparse file is 375M uncompressed.
- Requires p7zip to decompress.
Cylinders = 20805
Create from scratch.
Scratch
You need to create the disk image file before aranym will do anything with it. Then you can use the aranym menu to create a custom disk image.
echo blah > disk1.img aranym-mmu -G
Choose Disk from the menu and set the path for Hard disk IDE0 to point to the image file you created. Set the Disk Size to your desired size. Hit Generate Disk Image and allow the file to be overwritten. You will need to note the Cylinders, Heads, and Sectors per track.
Since a disk size of 4096MB has Cylinders = 8322, Heads = 16, and Sectors per track = 63 and creates a file of size 4294950912. We can also do the following.
dd if=/dev/zero of=disk1.img count=4294950912
or to be sparse.
dd if=/dev/zero of=disk1.img bs=1 count=0 seek=4294950912
A 10GB disk would have Cylinders = 20805 and a file size of 10737377280.
You need some minor changes to the LILO section of your Aranym/Configuration file to boot DebianInstaller.
Args = root=/dev/ram console=tty fb=false debug=par suite=etch-m68k modules=etch-support Ramdisk = initrd.gz
Where Ramdisk comes from DebianInstaller and suite=etch-m68k modules=etch-support are required for etch-m68k installation.
You also need to have the FastRAM set to something like 64. Larger numbers cause problems with debian-installer, but not later on the installed system (it's ramdisk related).
Debian Installer
DebianInstaller lends itself to answering the questions as you go.
I recommend the daily images (what will be the lenny installer) no matter what distribution/suite you're installing.
You need an atari kernel.
You need an initrd.
- All successful d-i aranym testing has been done with the nativehd (net-based) initrd.
- Following the prompts to tasksel gets a full base installation, which takes about an hour on a moderately fast pc with a good network connection.
DebianInstaller reboots at the end of the installation. This causes aranym to restart with the same configuration, which is not what you want. So once it reboots, you need to manually kill aranym and fix your configuration to boot from /dev/hda instead of Ramdisk. A feature request has been made to address this. Running ARAnyM with the -H flag prevents this.
Preseeding
More to follow. I plan on documenting my d-i regression testing config here with notes.