Alix

From Tuxisalive

Contents 1 Hardware 2 Why ? 3 Installation 4 Post installation setup 5 Tux droid software installation 6 usage

Hardware

PC Engines Alix : 100€ AMD Geode (LX800 x86) 256 Mo RAM 2x USB 2.0, 100baseT Ethernet.

Why ?

1. My main computer has an x64 operating system
2. I don't want to let my computer on 24/24 only for tuxdroid
3. I already had an Alix with centraltelephonique.ch's asterisk on it

Installation

1. Get yourself a 2/4GB compact flash card
2. Put the card in a card reader attached to your computer and attach your computer to a wired lan with Internet access
3. Burn latest Ubuntu's alternate i386 installation CD
4. Boot on the CD from your computer
5. Press F4 to choose text-only installation, then press enter
6. Install Ubuntu normally but be careful to choose the compact flash card as the destination drive and not your computer's hard drive. Note down the drive letter assigned to your compact flash (e.g. /dev/sdc)
7. At the end of installation say that you don't want to install grub in the MBR of your first bootable disk
8. In the next screen, ask the installer to install grub in the MBR of your compact flash (you noted the correct device in step 6).
9. Continue the installation until it is asked to reboot, but don't reboot now

Post installation setup

• Press Ctrl+Alt+F3, then enter to enter a console

mount -t proc none /target/proc
mount -o bind /dev /target/dev
chroot /target
dhclient
echo "" > /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

This is because the alix will have a different network card than the current computer and we don't want the interface to be renamed as eth1

• vim /etc/network/interfaces

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

• remove all occurrence of quiet splash from grub's menu.lst

vim /boot/grub/menu.lst

• Edit fstab

vim /etc/fstab

• Add the two following lines at the end of it(we don't want to wear the compact flash card too much):

none /tmp tmpfs nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777 0 0
none /var/tmp tmpfs nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777 0 0

• Then edit the first non-comment line and add noatime, before errors=remount-ro

• Comment the line that contains swap if you don't need swap and/or don't want to risk your flash card

• Uncomment the multiverse lines form the sources.list

vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Tux droid software installation

• First install the dependencies (according to [How_to_install_on_Linux])

sudo aptitude update;sudo aptitude dist-upgrade;sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jre libportaudio2 python-setuptools python-dev python-xml python-ctypes libstdc++5 libstdc++ make;sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

• Then download the tuxsetup tar.gz and the text-to-speach voices. For example :

wget ftp://ftp.kysoh.com/apps/installers/unix32/tuxsetup/tar/tuxsetup-2.2.0.tar.gz
wget ftp://ftp.kysoh.com/apps/resources/tts_voices/tarball/tuxdroid-tts-voices.USEnglish.tar.gz
tar xzf tuxs*.tar.gz
tar xzf tuxd*.tar.gz
rm *.tar.gz
cd tuxdroid-tts-voices.USEnglish
./WIZARD
cd ..
cd tuxsetup
make install

• You can now reboot your computer and put back the compact flash card inside your Alix

usage

TODO. the python interface works fine, the tts too and I can even run the java interface remotely, I have still to play with all this before completing this wiki page