MIPS Installation
There is no installable medium for mips64el yet. You can install the basic system by following the instructions below using another system installed on the machine, or (with small changes) a system of another architecture with the target disk connected.
Contents
- 1 Getting the base system
- 2 Partitions
- 3 Extract the base tarball
- 4 Chrooting the system
- 5 Installing basic packages
- 6 Configuring basic packages
- 7 Set the configuration editor
- 8 Mounting partitions at boot
- 9 Exiting the chroot
- 10 Add the new system to PMON
- 11 Booting
- 12 Post Install
- 13 Getting Help
1 Getting the base system
Download the latest base install. This tar archive contains all of the base packages, and it's practically the same as a newly installed Parabola. (It is made using librebasebuilder from libretools.)
Extract it on a different partition from your current system: see Chrooting the system section below.
2 Partitions
Our Yeeloongs didn't have unpartitioned space. What we did is, using gparted, turn off the swap partition and resize it to have more space to install the new system. After this, with the same program, we formatted this partition in ext3 file system.
3 Extract the base tarball
Run the following commands as root:
mkdir /media/parabola mount /dev/sda7 /media/parabola tar xfvj parabola-mips64el-*.tar.bz2 -C /media/parabola
If you are installing from a non-mips64el machine (or want to configure it later), skip to the Mounting partitions at boot section and edit /media/parabola/etc/fstab instead of /etc/fstab.
4 Chrooting the system
Run the following commands as root to chroot into the system:
mount -t proc none /media/parabola/proc mount --rbind /dev /media/parabola/dev mount --rbind /sys /media/parabola/sys chroot /media/parabola /bin/bash
You'll enter into a new shell.
5 Installing basic packages
Make sure you can access the Internet from the precursor operating system from which you are doing the Parabola install.
The base image only includes the minimal packages needed to boot and get to a command line, and then configure a wired network interface using the "ip" command. You'll probably want to install more packages at this point so you can have a basic GUI desktop environment, web browser, and wifi after your first parabola boot.
You'll first need to edit /etc/resolv.conf so your chroot system can resolve Parabola's package servers. For example:
cat > /etc/resolv.conf << EOF # dns.telecomix.org - Telecomix Censorship-proof DNS nameserver 91.191.136.152 EOF
Now install the additional packages:
pacman -Suy xorg-server xf86-input-evdev xf86-video-siliconmotion \ xf86-video-fbdev gdm xfce4 network-manager-applet \ gnome-power-manager links lynx iceweasel-libre rfkill \ ttf-dejavu ttf-liberation net-tools gedit
This should be enough to get other relatively basic things, such as sound and printing, set up after you boot into Parabola.
6 Configuring basic packages
To make gdm use xfce4 session by default, you can:
mv /usr/share/xsessions/gnome.desktop /root/
Edit /etc/rc.conf DAEMONS line to read:
DAEMONS=(hwclock metalog dbus networkmanager netfs crond gdm)
7 Set the configuration editor
The base install has vi, nano, ed and zile (a small Emacs-like editor) installed by default, in our example we are using the nano editor, but if you need another editor than any of the default editors, you can install other editors from repos. If you need another editor, run the following command to install, e.g. Emacs:
pacman -Sy emacs
Or install emacs-nox to avoid X dependencies:
pacman -Sy emacs-nox
8 Mounting partitions at boot
Configure the /etc/fstab file to mount the partitions at boot:
nano /etc/fstab /dev/sda7 / ext3 defaults 0 0 /dev/sda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
9 Exiting the chroot
exit umount /media/parabola/dev/shm umount /media/parabola/dev/pts umount /media/parabola/dev umount /media/parabola/sys umount /media/parabola/proc umount /media/parabola/
10 Add the new system to PMON
To boot Parabola directly from PMON, edit PMON's file boot.cfg:
nano /boot/boot.cfg
Then add the following as the first entry in it:
title Parabola GNU/Linux-libre kernel (wd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz-linux-libre args root=/dev/sda7 console=tty no_auto_cmd resume=/dev/sda3 libata.force=80c rootdelay=8
With (wd0,6) corresponding to /dev/sda7.
If you don't need it, you can uninstall mkinitcpio and remove the /boot/initramfs-linux-libre.img and /boot/initramfs-linux-libre-fallback.img to save disk space and kernel update time.
11 Booting
Reboot and select Parabola on the menu!
12 Post Install
You'll want to set a root password. Switch to a virtual terminal by pressing ctrl-alt-f1 and then login as root (no password) and type passwd. You can press ctrl-alt-f7 to move back to the graphical login session.
After booting for the first time it is recommended you upgrade the system:
pacman -Syu
If you plan on running wireless from this point forward, you may want to enable the rfkill daemon. Having this start before net-profiles or networkmanager allows wifi to start on boot without having to press the wireless button on the keyboard (Fn + F5).
nano /etc/rc.conf
Then add rfkill before net-profiles or networkmanager in DAEMONS=()
The next time you reboot you should have working wireless.
13 Getting Help
If you need help, you can find it on the #parabola IRC channel or the mailing list.