I got my debian bootstrap to the point where it can now apt-get.

Life is on easy streets now boys. :D

Congrats Scotty!

Do you mind posting a step by step instruction how you did it?

on the same token, I think everybody has noticed that wget is available in the iLiad default OS.

Yes but wget doesn't do dependency trees and pull all the goodies for you, apt-get does.

The thing that makes me hesitant about documenting apt-get is that if you don't set up the memory card... you'll fill your root filesystem faster than you can say "oh no!" doing something like "apt-get emacs".

Wow.. old post...

I am *really* interested to know what became of this. Do I understand correctly that you got a system working where you could just apt-get install stuff on the iliad, scotty1024?

I have seen teasers scattered all over the place about a running emacs on iliad, and here a working apt-get. Anybody have more info about this?

Currently my interest is in getting perl running on the iliad (and maybe a common lisp implementation, just for fun ;), and being able to just do apt-get install perl would be great. But also a real bash shell, and a ton of other apps that are available to debian at the moment already.

I am *really* interested to know what became of this. Do I understand correctly that you got a system working where you could just apt-get install stuff on the iliad, scotty1024?

Creating a debian chroot in any ARM device is really simple. You only have to create a tarball of the filesystem of another ARM device (nslu2 with Debian ARM installed, i.e.) and put that in a CF os SD card. Then chroot to it and it's done.

If you don't have a Debian ARM device liying somewhere in your house, you have to create a debian chroot using debootstrap. Take care that you want to select the arm architecture, not the newer armel one (it requires a somwhat recent 2.6 kernel to work, and the iliad still uses a 2.4 kernel).

A third alternative is using the zaurus-debian-*.tgz from http://pocketworkstation.org/, but it is a rather old debian (woody? sarge?), and you would have to fix /etc/apt/sources.list and dist-upgrade to the latest.

Note: I myself have a slug with debian etch, and a zaurus with debian in a chroot, but it is a very "dirty" installation and not very reasonable to distribute :-/.

Hmmm, thanks for that info Antartica. That sounds a lot easier than I thought. But I was under the impression that Scotty had it running more or less in or next to the root install on the iliad. Your explanation sounds a lot more sane. ;)

And as I've done quite a few debootstraps on other machines I should be able to get somewhere... Thanks!