Installing Debian Linux on a Soekris box using the serial console

I was using DHCP, TFTP and PXE to install debian on a Soekris 4801.  The tftp daemon I was using was ATFTPD.  It wouldn’t allow the Soekris to PXE boot until I changed a startup parameter in /etc/default/ataftpd.  I added ‘–no-blksize ‘ to the list of startup parameters based on some blog entries I found.

The other thing that I had to do was create a symbolic link to pxelinux.cfg -> /tftpboot/debian-installer/i386/pxelinux.cfg.serial-9600/ instead of pxelinux.cfg.  This works much better with the installer over a serial terminal.

Here are some useful blog links for installing linux on a Soekris single board computer.

http://wiki.soekris.info/Installing_Debian_Linux_5.0

http://strugglers.net/wiki/Debian_on_Soekris

http://roland.entierement.nu/pages/debian-on-soekris-howto.html

http://www.linuxvillage.ca/support/soekris4801.html#inst

http://hugi.to/blog/archive/2006/12/23/ubuntu-pxe-install-via-windows

And a link to Soekris engineering:  http://www.soekris.com/index.htm