Creating an EABI Lenny system

The "Lenny" EABI system

The new debian "Lenny" release (5) comes with an eabi version, called "armel" versus the standard, oabi "arm" version. Getting there is not so trivial.

Kernel: 2.6.21-ts

First create a new kernel (see ). Make sure you use the eabi cross compiler and have

CONFIG_ARM_THUMB=y
CONFIG_AEABI=y
CONFIG_OABI_COMPAT=y

set for the kernel.

This should boot with the old "etch" (release 4) version.

Changing the system

Not so simple, and I am not there yet.

First attempt using "apt-get dist-upgrade" failed, in that it upgrades to the "arm" and not the "armel" version.

Next attempt: follow these http://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiHowto, but then different.

Try using debootstrap, info is here: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/426

First get it, then run it

apt-get install debootstrap
debootstrap --verbose --arch armel --foreign lenny /armel-chroot http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian

Next, get some coffee and grade your homework, since this takes a while. Oh, and the card you do this on needs to be big enough. I used an 8GB microSD with an adapter.

Strangely, this got a whole bunch of stuff, but it did NOT seem to include "apt-get", an essential part to continue? Also /etc/apt/sources.list had an invalid entry.

To fix this, unpack and install stuff from /var/cache/apt/archives, some require the --force-depends flag to resolve linked dependencies. (libgcc1 depends on libc6 which depends on libgcc1).