Building a minimal ubuntu rootfs for an SD Card or USB Drive

[jalto]

Hello everyone,

I have built a rootfs for my SD card using the rootstock tool provided my the Ubuntu arm team.  Add a kernel and it's up and running.  The details are provided at the wiki (http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/Ubuntu_9.0.4_Plug_Computer_Distribution).  The result is a bare minimal Ubuntu install that has unique ssh keys and has the ubuntu style user accounts (root with random password and the user account having sudo rights).  This method should be recommended instead of copying the tarball available in the downloads section of http://www.openplug.org/  for security reasons.

Anyway, the wiki is a first draft and I started this thread to allow people to ask question if they need me to elaborate on anything.

John

[riel]

Maybe completedly off, but I am curious if there is a 8.04 package available also?

The packages for 9.04 are not as stable/well made as the 8.04 ones. Got some real issues in certain python packages.

[superpat]

Hi,

I used rootstock method last week worked fine!

However,  downloaded latest version of rootstock (29) today. This has a bug

I: Starting basic services in VM
mount: mount point /dev/pts does not exist
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
I: Killed ...

Noted  OLiver has been altering this part of code, I am trying register with bug reports on Launchpad, but am having problems. If anyone can check this and ping Oliver for me I will be very grateful.

Patrick


EDIT   Finally got access to bug reporting   Oliver has  fixed the bug and raised the curent revision of rootstock  I am trying out the new rev, but it takes several hours to build the file system . Will add reply when finished build

[superpat]

Hi,

I checked out the latest version of rootstock and it works great!

It can take a looong time on a slow m/c though

cheers

Patrick