[PLUG] Pebble, Pyramid, Puppy, patheticness on my picomachine

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Sat Sep 2 06:56:41 UTC 2006


>>>>> "Brendan" == Brendan Miller <brmiller at kudzuforest.com> writes:

Brendan> With the recent discussions on Pebble and Pyramid Linux, I
Brendan> wondered how suitable these were for "generic" x86 hardware
Brendan> (as opposed to an outright embedded environment).  I have a
Brendan> Neoware thin client with 64MB IDE flash DOM, it's integrated
Brendan> Rtl8139 (or whatever) 10/100 NIC, and a PCI slot with a
Brendan> Ralink RT2500-based 802.11g card.  I would like to make this
Brendan> box into a wireless router/gateway device between my wired
Brendan> lan and a wireless network.

Brendan> I have done work on the Neoware boxen in the past, and their
Brendan> RedHat-derivative NeoLinux is pretty decent, albeit requiring
Brendan> a specific build environment.  I have an rt2500 driver built
Brendan> for this box that associates and works, but I have no
Brendan> iptables so it's kind of hard to do
Brendan> NAT/forwarding/et.al. without it.

Brendan> I could set up a build environment for the box and hack away,
Brendan> but I was kind of hoping to get this project running sooner
Brendan> than later.  Do either Pebble or Pyramid support the rt2500?
Brendan> I've looked at Puppy too, but a lot of these small linux
Brendan> distros want to boot from a CD.  The Neobox has USB, so I
Brendan> could boot from a USB floppy (which I have), but I dont' have
Brendan> a USB CDROM.  It can PXE boot too--so I could set up some
Brendan> shenanigan using that.

Brendan> Basically, it comes down to the fact that I am lazy, er--I
Brendan> have two kids under two years old, and no time to work on
Brendan> this, and just need it to work.  Anyone have any Quick Routes
Brendan> to Routing Bliss that should work on this hardware?

The soekris hardware use "generic x86" instructions.  Some of the
hardware Pebble/Pyramid is intended to run on is 486-like and some is
pentium-like.  It ought to work on generic x86 hardware.  I got
Pyramid booting on a Fujitsu Stylistic.

If it helps any, I have written up some of the procedure I used in
hacking on one of our pebble-derived images:

  <http://wiki.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MississippiMetrixConfiguration>

Not all of the things I refer to are immediately available to the
general public (mostly things locally hacked), but it gives you some
ideas how it can work.  It is mostly my notes on how I got things
working so I can repeat it all after I've forgotten in a week.

If your wireless hardware works in Ubuntu, then you can follow my
general instructions for Pyramid... copying the files needed from an
Ubuntu Live-CD environment.


-- 
Russell Senior, Secretary
russell at personaltelco.net



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