OpenZipIt No Flash Test

This proceedure is still in development. It does not currently work and may never work; there are still a few obsticles to overcome. It is also probable that certain changes will not be possible to test this way.

The goal is to be able to test new ramdisk images on your zipit without flashing the device. It may also provide a way to perform more complex changes to the image. This technique mounts the image on a seperate linux box in an attempt to save RAM, it may be necessary to mount the image locally on the ZipIt and sacrifice the RAM.

On Linux Box:

1. # Unzip ramdisk.gz file. 2. # mkdir /yournfsshare/image 3. # mount -o loop ramdisk /mnt/image 4. # cd /mnt/image

On your Zipit:

5. mkdir /mnt/nfs 6. Then you can mount the NFS server using a command that looks something like: mount -t nfs -o nolock,tcp,intr server_ip_address:/server_folder /mnt/nfs

(replacing server_ip_address and server_folder with details of your server)

7. Chroot: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2005.0/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=6 This is where it currently falls apart. These directions require tcl scripts specific to Gentoo.

8. Test as you see fit. It may also be possible to make lasting changes, will know for sure when/if simple testing can be made to work. 9. Powercycle the zipit.

On your Linux Box:

10. cd back to the directory housing your ramdisk file. 11. umount /mnt/image

If it's found that lasting changes can be made (and you want to use them.)

12. gzip -9 ramdisk

13. Re-flash your zipit, using the new ramdisk.gz image instead of the offical OpenZipIt version.

http://www.tjw.org/chroot-login-HOWTO/ http://www.bpfh.net/simes/computing/chroot-break.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroot http://publibn.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/cmds/aixcmds1/chroot.htm