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Differences between Jeff's installed and standard Squeeze installer?

Posted by fijam 
Differences between Jeff's installed and standard Squeeze installer?
January 30, 2011 06:00AM
I have noticed that Debian testing installer supports Dockstar (http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html). What are the differences between a system installed with the default installer and one using Jeff's script? I understand that Jeff's script takes care of uboot upgrade but are there any differences in Debian's configuration files, filesystem layout or the way the following updates are handled?
Re: Differences between Jeff's installed and standard Squeeze installer?
January 30, 2011 05:39PM
There's only a few differences in a system installed with Jeff's script than a standard Debian install. A -kirkwood kernel variant gets installed for use on Marvell Kirkwood based systems like the Sheevaplug and Dockstar. A couple of uboot packages get installed. The bootloader is modified on the Dockstar itself. A standard Debian install goes onto your external drive. A few files are added (blparam for modifying the Dockstar's internal environment variables, a config file in /etc to tell blparam where to look for and read/write variables), and a few other files are set up to handle a Dockstar-like configuration out of the box (networking, telling the system there's no hardware clock, mount points for the external drive, a default root password).

Primarily, what Jeff's script does is make it so you don't need a console to install Debian, since the Dockstar doesn't support a monitor out of the box, and using a console is tedious at best. His script is fully automated, and when it's done, you have a full Debian system without having to respond to prompts or format your external drive manually or select what packages you want. The standard installer that you linked to requires all of that, and thus isn't Dockstar friendly. There's no difference in filesystem layout or upgrade methods afterwards.

As a side note: what I've seen from most of the questions in the forums is how few people realize that, once you've run Jeff's install script and rebooted, if your system comes up, you've now got a bona fide Debian system, and can take advantage of the far larger number of resources available to the Debian. Once you've got a working system, it's no longer a special situation, but it's like any other Debian system out there.
Re: Differences between Jeff's installed and standard Squeeze installer?
February 01, 2011 08:37AM
Thanks for clearing it up.
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