Re: Proposal for making raspberry pi and similar systems easier to install

[Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost>]

On 06-Mar-2013 Andy Ruhl wrote:
> The standard image isn't so nice in my case (2gb SD card), here's what
> it looks like after the first boot:
> 
> Filesystem         Size       Used      Avail %Cap Mounted on
> /dev/ld0a          558M       547M       -17M 103% /
> /dev/ld0e           52M       7.5M        44M  14% /boot
> 
> In the specific case of the Raspberry Pi, it would be nice to just
> boot a regular sysinst from an SD card, then do the install to a USB
> disk of some sort (since you can get ones with large storage). At that
> point I wouldn't mind leaving a small SD card in the machine whose
> sole purpose is to boot  and mount root from the USB disk. Or I
> suppose the hardware could possibly be hacked to boot directly from
> USB.

That is exactly what I am to fix, is your configuration (and mine, with the 8GB
sd card).  While we certainly can install onto a USB drive, thats really not my
goal.  What my system should allow you to do, is boot off an SD card, run
sysinst, and have it repartition the SD card out from under you, and install
netbsd on it over the network, or FROM a USB stick.  The end result will be
your machine, running on the SD card, with all available space, regardless of
card size.  You should end up with ~1.4 GB free on /.

It'll prolly take me a week or so to get a prototype running, I'll post here if
I have something to test.

---
Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost>
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS http://www.netbsd.org/
Genecys: Open Source 3D MMORPG: http://www.genecys.org/