{"id":228,"date":"2007-02-08T10:07:33","date_gmt":"2007-02-08T08:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=228"},"modified":"2007-02-08T10:11:16","modified_gmt":"2007-02-08T08:11:16","slug":"running-debian-on-your-linksys-wrt54g-sort-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=228","title":{"rendered":"Running Debian on your Linksys WRT54G* … sort of"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m the happy owner of a Linksys WRT54GL. OpenWRT<\/a> is nice, but … well. Debian is just nicer. And I couldn’t resist the idea of running Debian on this little MIPS system. Since there’s clearly not enough space available on the Linksys, I decided to install etch in a chroot, that I would mount using NFS.<\/p>\n

Joey tried that already<\/a>, the Debian wiki provides some information<\/a>, but I use another technique. <\/p>\n

First, on another system (an i386, I debootstrap’ed a mipsel etch, using --foreign<\/tt>. This tells debootstrap not to run the second stage<\/i>:
\ndebootstrap --arch mipsel --foreign etch \/space\/debian-mipsel http:\/\/ftp.fr.debian.org\/debian<\/tt><\/p>\n

Then, I modified \/etc\/exports<\/tt> to allow the router to mount that chroot:
\n\/space\/debian-mipsel 192.168.1.1(rw,sync,no_root_squash)<\/tt><\/p>\n

I mounted it on the router:
\nipkg install kmod-nfs
\ninsmod sunrpc
\ninsmod lockd
\ninsmod nfs
\nmount -t nfs star:\/space\/debian-mipsel \/debian -o nolock
\nmount -t proc \/dev\/null \/debian\/proc<\/tt><\/p>\n

I set up some swap space on the NFS mount (mandatory, or debootstrap’s second stage will fail):
\nipkg install losetup
\nipkg install kmod-loop
\nipkg install swap-utils
\ndd if=\/dev\/zero of=\/debian\/swapfile bs=1M count=100
\nlosetup \/dev\/loop\/0 \/debian\/swapfile
\nmkswap \/dev\/loop\/0
\nswapon \/dev\/loop\/0<\/tt><\/p>\n

I chrooted inside \/debian, and ran debootstrap’s second stage:
\nchroot \/debian \/bin\/bash
\ndebootstrap\/debootstrap --second-stage<\/tt><\/p>\n

When you are done playing, you can disable the swap space and umount everything:
\nswapoff \/dev\/loop\/0
\nlosetup -d \/dev\/loop\/0
\numount \/debian\/proc
\nsleep 1 # or umount \/debian will fail
\numount \/debian<\/tt><\/p>\n

If you want to re-mount everything, all you need to do is:
\ninsmod sunrpc
\ninsmod lockd
\ninsmod nfs
\nmount -t nfs star:\/space\/debian-mipsel \/debian -o nolock
\nmount -t proc \/dev\/null \/debian\/proc
\nlosetup \/dev\/loop\/0 \/debian\/swapfile
\nswapon \/dev\/loop\/0
\nchroot \/debian \/bin\/bash<\/tt><\/p>\n

That first stage\/second stage split in debootstrap is really cool: it’s an easy way to run Debian anywhere, only requiring to be able to chroot<\/tt> at some point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m the happy owner of a Linksys WRT54GL. OpenWRT is nice, but … well. Debian is just nicer. And I couldn’t resist the idea of running Debian on this little MIPS system. Since there’s clearly not enough space available on the Linksys, I decided to install etch in a chroot, that I would mount using […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,13,12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debianubuntu","category-planetdebian","category-planetubuntu","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}