View source for Bootstrapping Alpine on Soekris net4xxx

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[[Category:HOWTO]]


This is a step-by-step guide on bootstrapping the latest (developement) Alpine Linux on a CF card for Soekris net4xxx routers


We assume our CF reader is at /dev/sdb, with a 512+ MB CF formatted card loaded and will be mounted on /mnt/flash. We also assume root priviledges.

 export FLASHDEVICE=/dev/sdb1
 export MNT=/mnt/flash

First, we download the latest usbdrive tarball

 wget http://dev.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v1.7/usbdrive/alpine-1.7.5-i386.tar.gz

and unpack it on our CF card

 mount $FLASHDEVICE $MNT
 tar xzf ../alpine-1.7.5-i386.tar.gz -C $MNT

Next step is to build a custom initrd (for the serial console to work)

 mkdir /tmp/alpine
 cd /tmp/alpine
 zcat $MNT/kernel/generic/hd-ext3.gz > soekris
 tar xjf $MNT/base.tar.bz2 ./etc/inittab
 sed -i -e 's/^::respawn.*//' -e 's/^tty.*//' -e 's/^#\(ttyS0.*\) 115200 \(.*\)/\1 19200 \2/' etc/inittab
 echo etc/inittab | cpio -o -H newc -A -O soekris
 gzip -c -9 soekris > $MNT/kernel/generic/soekris.gz

and a custom syslinux.cfg

 cat > $MNT/syslinux.cfg <<EOF
 serial 0 19200
 timeout 0
 default generic-soekris
 
 label generic-soekris
         kernel /kernel/generic/bzImage
         append initrd=/kernel/generic/soekris.gz rw alpine_dev=hda1:vfat root_dev=none:tmpfs alpine_base=base.tar.bz2 pkg_dev=hda1:vfat pkg_subdir=/apks cfg_dev=hda1:vfat modloop=/kernel/generic/modloop.cmg console=ttyS0,19200
 EOF

Finally, we make the CF bootable

 syslinux $FLASHDEVICE
 umount alpine