Root file system for powerpc 74xx board

[Bill Farrow]

> I have  Linux running on an intel x86 machine with cross
> development environment. I want to host 74xx file system
> with Xfree86 and library support  on the intel machine. 
>
> I will boot the file system using NFS to the 74xx system.
>
> How to create/extract the file system with xfree86 support from fedora file system  ?

I'm not sure if Fedora Linux has a Live CD that you can download for PPC machines.  We used an Ubuntu (Live) CD for our setup.  In our case the CD is bootable and contains a file called filesyste.squashfs that is a full desktop root filesystem with Xorg, all compiled for PPC.  You wont be able to unpack the squashfs file on your x86 Host because of the byte ordering, so you need to use your PPC target to do the work.

Mount the CDROM iso image on your x86 Host and then export this via NFS to your PPC target
  Host# sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 ubuntu-6.10-desktop-powerpc.iso /mnt/
  Host# sudo mkdir /opt/ubuntu
  Host# sudo vi /etc/exports
    /mnt 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(rw,no_root_squash,sync)
    /opt/ubuntu 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(rw,no_root_squash,sync)

Use the Target to mount via nfs the Hosts /mnt/ directory that you exported, then mount via loopback the filesystem.squashfs and copy the contents back to the Host's nfs exported /mnt/ directory.

  Target# mount host_ip_address:/mnt/ /mnt/host
  Target# mount /mnt/host/casper/filesystem.squashfs /mnt/squashfs
  Target# mount host_ip_address:/ubuntu/ /mnt/ubuntu
  Target# cp -a /mnt/squashfs /mnt/ubuntu

I'm writing this from memory, so the above commands may be incorrect but the general idea and flow should be OK.

Bill