A Virtual Appliance with Debian Squeeze and OpenWRT-XBurst Development Tools installed - for "out of the box" compilation for the Nanonote

[Ernest Kugel]

Hi guys, I'm writing about a Virtual Appliance with Debian Squeeze and 
OpenWRT-XBurst Development Tools installed, which would allow 
immediately compiling OpenWRT packages for the Nanonote without going 
through the painful process of setting up the development environment 
yourself.

As a non-developer, I found a working development environment to be the 
single most confusing part of porting to the Nanonote, even more 
confusing than OpenWRT's Makefiles. Granted, this could be my personal 
lack of talent or skill, but it left me thinking removing this 
"steppingstone" for some of the less experienced users might open more 
doors, faster, for beginning Nanonote enthusiasts. The instructions at 
http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Building_OpenWRT_on_Debian_6 are great, 
but might slightly intimidate less experienced Linux users. They are 
also slightly daunting to follow if the need arises frequently (if 
reinstalling OS, royally screwed something up, or other scenarios I'm 
sure you ran into).

The easiest way to get around this I could come up with was creating a 
Virtual Appliance which contains the basics for compiling for the 
Nanonote, using the wiki instructions for Debian Squeeze. Such an 
appliance can be run in VirtualBox (free and open source) or VMWare 
Player (free as in beer), even on Windows hosts. The result is a single 
2.4 GB file with a ready toolchain which is ready to "accept" package 
Makefiles and compile them. Debian was installed, the toolchain was 
compiled, the locales and paths were set. I gave it a quick test 
compiling Pem (and a load of Perl dependencies) and it seemed to work.

The Virtual Appliance is unimaginatively called "Debian Squeeze with 
OpenWRT-XBurst Development Tools" and comes as a single .OVA file. See 
details below.

Virtual Appliance Download Page on 1fichier.com:  
http://0tqstz.1fichier.com/en/index.html
.OVA file MD5 sum:  f9ebe1b0cfe63ae1aa584ddff7b222ed
user:  build
password:  gongshow
root password:  gongshow

Instructions:
1. Install VirtualBox.
2. Download Virtual Appliance .OVA file.
3. In VirtualBox click on "Machine" > "Import" and select the .OVA file.

I've added a brief section under the Building on ... Debian Squeeze wiki 
page.

Hope someone finds this helpful.

-- 
Ernest Kugel