Pandora OS from the SD card?


marktuson

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Jan 11, 2010
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To start: I haven't yet got my Pandora. I'm still fantasizing about it, and looking forward to it arriving, whenever that might happen.


I've done a thread on this before, but I think I know more what I want now. I might not, but there we go.


512MB NAND. That's not very much, considering I run my NanoNote on 2GB without X, but with millions of utilities and other software, my Debian distribution coming to 600MB. So, when my Pandora arrives, I want to run the OS from an SD card, or at least all the software. Thinking about it, I believe I've come up with two or three cunning plans to get it working the way I want:


Cunning plan 1: keep Angstrom on it, have separate /usr and /home partitions on the SD card (will be having /home on the SD card anyway). Do this by copying contents of current /usr to new partition, having said partition mounted at /usr in /etc/fstab, clearing the NAND copy of /usr, and then rebooting.


Cunning plan 2: put entire Pandora Angstrom distribution on SD card and boot from it/chroot to it at boot.


Cunning plan 3: install Debian on SD card, chrooting to it so as to keep Pandora utilities (particularly the PND format).


What are your thoughts? I want more room to expand the OS, at least 8GB or so. I intend to have a swap partition anyway, on the SD card in the first slot*, so putting a /usr partition on the card isn't going to make me cry. Only having 512MB for the system, however, is.


* Going to get a 64GB card and partition it with 1GB swap, maybe 8GB /usr if appropriate, and the rest /home. Going to stick it in somehow (possibly permanently with epoxy, or temporary with gaffer tape). Second slot will be just for putting files on it that I download on other boxes.
 
Cunning plan 1: keep Angstrom on it, have separate /usr and /home partitions on the SD card (will be having /home on the SD card anyway). Do this by copying contents of current /usr to new partition, having said partition mounted at /usr in /etc/fstab, clearing the NAND copy of /usr, and then rebooting.
Basically a waste. Thanks to the magic of PND, the only things that are written to /home are system specific configuration options, like background settings and things. Applications such as Firefox write everything to the SD card already, so moving home doesn't yield a huge benefit. Plus, you're effectively stuck with an SD card you can't remove, made worse by mounting /usr as well. Difficult to copy stuff to it from your PC. If you're going to be dependent on an SD card because of a couple of directories, why not leave the NAND as just a base install and...

Cunning plan 2: put entire Pandora Angstrom distribution on SD card and boot from it/chroot to it at boot.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy :D


Someone was also working on a PND that would set this all up for you, but talk about directory mounting and chroot, I can tell you know what you're doing and won't insult you with the easy method (also I'm too lazy to look for it :p ). Just putting everything on the SD card and leaving the NAND fresh means you have something you can quickly fall back on if your SD card gets broken or lost or something. Especially useful if you're doing kernel dev work. On mine, I modify my kernel, whoops it broke, boot to NAND and just copy the kernel back onto my SD card. Problem solved.

Cunning plan 3: install Debian on SD card, chrooting to it so as to keep Pandora utilities (particularly the PND format).
Also a good plan. There are three existing methods. You can install Debian ARM onto an SD card, which has questionable support at the moment; you can find Stuckies' extend, which does exactly as you suggest and is fairly well supported; alternatively, another project was recently started which puts Debian (or was it Ubuntu?) into a PND which you could then run as any other program to give you a completely new environment. Haven't been following that third project very well, so I may have the premise wrong. It's in the beta testing forum somewhere.

What are your thoughts? I want more room to expand the OS, at least 8GB or so. I intend to have a swap partition anyway, on the SD card in the first slot*, so putting a /usr partition on the card isn't going to make me cry. Only having 512MB for the system, however, is.
I've not actually had any problems. Honestly, the only reason I have an SD boot is because I mess with the kernel. There's just enough room on the NAND to install gcc and all the dev libraries you might need, everything else I build myself and install to SD card or someone else has already built into a PND which goes on SD card. Have I mentioned how awesome PND format is? :D

* Going to get a 64GB card and partition it with 1GB swap, maybe 8GB /usr if appropriate, and the rest /home. Going to stick it in somehow (possibly permanently with epoxy, or temporary with gaffer tape). Second slot will be just for putting files on it that I download on other boxes.
If you stick it in permanently, you have quite the risk if your OS gets corrupted. The Pandora is unbrickable by virtue of it having very low level code at boot time which can read a special file from a FAT32 formatted card in slot 1 to reflash the firmware. If your firmware breaks (which will happen if you're of a hackering sort of person :D ) and you can't boot anymore, and you can't remove the SD card to put this reflash file on it, you're pretty much stuck.
 
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