Root filesystem

NOTE: Copied from the old LinuxWMT sourceforge page - originally written by Alexey Charkov
NOTE: this page is not yet finalized!

1. Get an appropriate tarball with the root filesystem contents. You'll need the one that is not specific to any device, just a plain .tar.xz file for arm (not armhfp).
An archive including Fedora 17 with XFCE is located at http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/17/Images/arm/Fedora-17-arm-xfce.tar.xz

2. Get an SD card of at least 4GB and plug it into your Linux box

3. Use fdisk to create 3 partitions on the SD card: one to hold the kernel and u-boot scripts (~64MB should be enough), one for swap (~1GB) and one for root filesystem (the rest)

4. Format the first partition as VFAT, run mkswap on the second partition and format the last one as some sane standard Linux filesystem like ext4 or btrfs

5. Mount the last partition and extract your downloaded Fedora tarball there:
cd /path_to_your_mountpoint
tar -xJvpf /path_to/Fedora-17-arm-xfce.tar.xz

6. Compile a kernel image as described on page Build. Don't forget to include support for SD/MMC and your root filesystem (both built-in, not as a module).

7. To install any required modules for your kernel to the newly created root filesystem, run the following from the kernel source directory:
make ARCH=arm INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/path_to_your_mountpoint modules_install

8. Put your kernel image and an appropriate u-boot script onto the first VFAT partition

9. Don't forget to unmount your filesystems before removing the card from your PC:
cd ~
umount /path_to_your_mountpoint