devsus

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Overview
========

Devsus is a script that builds bootable, libre Devuan (http://www.devuan.org/)
images for the Asus C201 Chromebook, one of the few laptops able to boot and run
without any non-free software, all the way down to the firmware level. The C201
is supported by Libreboot (http://www.libreboot.org/).

The images produced by Devsus contain the latest Chrome OS kernel, deblobbed
using the Linux-libre (http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/) scripts and tuned for
smaller size, better performance and shorter boot times.

In addition, the images contain the latest firmware for the freedom-friendly,
Atheros AR9271 based WiFi dongles.

Moreover, the Devuan installation is very minimal and consists of a barebones
Devuan base, plus crucial command-line tools, like those required to connect to
a WiFi network.

Dependencies
============

Devsus has been tested on Devuan 1 (Jessie) on x86_64, with the following
packages installed:

apt install --no-install-recommends --no-install-suggests \
parted cgpt \
git gawk device-tree-compiler vboot-kernel-utils gcc-arm-none-eabi \
u-boot-tools \
gcc make libc-dev wget g++ cmake m4 patch \
binfmt-support qemu-user-static debootstrap

Building
========

# ./devsus.sh

This produces two Devuan disk images:

1) devuan-jessie-c201-libre-16GB.img, a 16 GB image suitable for persistent
installation; its size should be exactly the size of the internal SSD
2) devuan-jessie-c201-libre-2GB.img, a 2 GB image suitable for booting the
laptop off USB

Usage
=====

To produce a bootable media, write the 2 GB image to a flash drive (of at least
2 GB):

# dd if=$SOMEWHERE/devuan-jessie-c201-libre-2GB.img of=/dev/$DEVICE bs=50M

The root password is blank.

The 2 GB image (yes, the smaller one) contains the larger, 16 GB one under /.
This way, it is possible to boot the laptop through USB, then install Devuan
persistently without having to download or store the large image separately.

Persistent installation is performed using dd, too:

# dd if=/devuan-jessie-c201-libre-16GB.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=50M

Modifications
=============

The images produced by Devsus are very close to stock Devuan:

- Many redundant drivers were removed from the kernel
- Several responsiveness or performance vs. power consumption kernel
configuration choices have been changed
- APT has been configured not to install "recommended" packages by default
- Some critical (like udev) or useful (like iw) packages have been added
- unscd has been added, to cache DNS
- The number of virtual consoles has been reduced from 6 to 2

Credits and Legal Information
=============================

Devsus' kernel building procedure is based on the linux-veyron package of Arch
Linux ARM (http://www.archlinuxarm.org/).

Devsus is free and unencumbered software released under the terms of the GNU
General Public License, version 2; see COPYING for the license text. For a list
of its authors and contributors, see AUTHORS.

The ASCII art logo at the top was made using FIGlet (http://www.figlet.org/).