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Voyage Linux – fitting name, fitting linux

Posted: February 16th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: linux | 2 Comments »

The chosen operating system for this project is Voyage Linux. Voyage is a light weight build of Debian and the excellent package management system has passed from Voyage’s big brother. This is an almost perfect operating system for the project because it requires just 128mb of storage on the Compact Flash card, but retains the power and expandability of a much larger distribution.

Installing Voyage

Voyage is not like any operating system that I have come across before, it requires another operating system to build the distribution and copy onto the CF card. Looking at the readme file for Voyage, I thought that I could use OSX (on my iMac) to build the distribution, this did not work – no idea why…

So looks like I need a copy of Debian. This was easily achieved by using Parallels Desktop to run Debian as a virtual machine on my mac. The install of Debian was very straight forward.

What was not so straight-forward was getting Debian to detect the CF card. Took quite a bit of effort and a restart of Debian – may have been the restart that fixed the issues!

Then debian is used to format the compact flash to ext2 format using fdisk.

Then voyage.update is fired up and the on screen instructions are followed. There are 5 settings, where is the distribution source code, where is the compact flash, what kind of board are you installing it on (selected ALIX!), the bootloader (grub didn’t work on the first attempt so went for lilo) and what console configuration you require (I chose console not serial as I have a VGA output!) then copy the files to the card and exit.

The install took less that 5 minutes.

Pop the compact flash into the ALIX board and boot up!

voyagemotd

For info: I installed Voyage 0.5.2 which has since been outdated by Voyage 0.6

More info about Voyage can be found at http://linux.voyage.hk/

2 Comments on “Voyage Linux – fitting name, fitting linux”

  1. 1 Big Brother » Voyage Linux - fitting name, fitting linux said at 12:10 am on February 17th, 2009:

    [...] Robot Yacht – The Development Blog wrote an interesting post today on Voyage Linux – fitting name, fitting linuxHere’s a quick excerptVoyage is a light weight build of Debian and the excellent package management system has passed from Voyage’s big brother…. [...]

  2. 2 Jonathan Lumb said at 2:06 am on February 17th, 2009:

    The debian packaging system is one of the best around – I run my laptop entirely on Ubuntu Intrepid at the moment which also inherits many things from its Debian big brother. Good choice!

    The compilation on your Mac may have failed if the Mac motherboard uses a different architecture to the Alix motherboard you are using (the alix is x86 I believe) – I know that this used to be the case with Macs but since they changed to Intel, things may have changed?