Setting up Debian Squeeze on an AILX board

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Well, Firestarter never had worked well for me in the past and this time was no exception. I wish there was a simpler way to use iptables to route traffic without managing an entire firewall… oh wait, network manager in Debian Squeeze works fine! Alright then, time to switch.

I used the same procedure of building the image on my PC then writing it in one sweep to the flash card. Only this time I used VirtualBox because it works better and I found a command to convert the image to a raw file later on.

  1. Install Debian Squeeze from net-install cd
  2. Used ext3 and a swap partition even though ext2 and noswap would be a better option for an SSD/CF card, oh well!
  3. Set it up with grub and only the base-programs. No ‘desktop workstation’ this time, I wanted to slim down.
  4. Rebooted into the system
  5. Added contrib and non-free repos to apt’s sources.list
  6. Installed gnome-core, transmission, network-manager, htop, iceweasel (if not already installed), file-roller, firmware-ralink, iplist (may have to download and install seperately – used for ipblocker)
  7. Freenx on Squeeze doesn’t work right because the version from the Ubuntu repo want’s Ubuntu’s ‘upstart’ init system which would replace Debian’s init system. In light of this, I switched to using x2go, a similar program.
  8. Add the x2go repo to debian’s sources.lst (deb http://x2go.obviously-nice.de/deb/ lenny main ) The repo seems to work with all debians (squeeze worked fine, I also tried on debian 9.10 and it worked as well)
  9. Installed x2goserver-home
  10. Tested communication and hoped it worked – it did!
  11. Installed hamachi and set it to auto-start on bootup and make sure it’s logged in hourly via cron
  12. Set up the clock to use ntp by installing the ntp package. The system did the rest
  13. While I didn’t have to make a script to set the hwclock on shutdown this time, it might not be a bad idea in the future (see previous post)
  14. Didn’t have to stop GDM from coming up as gnome-core doesn’t have gdm
  15. Edited /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and added "send host-name "MYHOSTNAMEHERE"; so that it would report properly to my router
  16. Made sure to apt-get clean
  17. Append noresume to the grub boot line to save boot time
  18. Shut down the VM and convert the VDI to a RAW img so I can write it to a CF card ( VBoxManage clonehd –format RAW IMAGENAME.vdi IMAGENAME.img )
  19. Took my RAW file and copied it to my CF card (dd if=AILX.raw of=/dev/NAMEOFCFCARDHERE
  20. Plugged everything in and tried it out
  21. Works like a charm!

Let’s just hope that the routing portion works this time… I’ll post back in a bit

PS. Once installed I also setup the second ethernet to a static IP so I could always plug in to the computer and get my x2go desktop if I couldn’t get to it via hamachi. I used network manager but it might not work – we’ll see if I have to manually set options in the interfaces file or not.