Rabian

Rabian is the new Debian based Linux distribution for radxa products. Currently Rabian is based on Debian 8, jessie. Rabian will be the only distribution officially supported by radxa team(we have limited efforts). Currently Rabian supports the following boards:

• rock full/lite (2013)
• rock pro/lite (2014)
• rock2 square
• rock2 full

The features of Rabian:

• Fast and lightweight, full function desktop
• beautiful, clean and modern
• easy to use, radxa will provide more GUI apps and debian packages to make the device more friendly
• up to date, besides the updating from officail Debian package repository, radxa also provides up to date debian package server - apt.radxa.us

Nightly build download:

• http://build.radxa.com/rabian/nightly/

Development

Building the rabian image basically contains two tasks, generate the rootfs and build the rock-bsp.

Rootfs

We use live build the generate the Rabian Rootfs. The configuration files for live build can be found at radxa github. Below is how to generate the rootfs.

   mkdir rabian-build
   export BOARD=rock        # or rock_pro/rock_lite/rock2_square 
   sudo apt-get install debootstrap live-build
   sudo apt-get install dctrl-tools mtools parted squashfs-tools
   git clone https://github.com/radxa/radxa-lb.git
   cd radxa-lb
   sudo make $BOARD
   cd ..

You will have the rootfs for your board.

Everything else(Bootloader/kernel)

Rock-bsp is the tools we use to pack u-boot,kernel and rootfs into a NAND or eMMC or SDcard image for radxa boards.

First, get the image name we built with radxa-lb just now.

   export IMAGE=$(basename radxa-lb/rabian_${BOARD}_*.ext4)
   sudo apt-get install build-essential lzop libncurses5-dev libssl-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev
   sudo apt-get install libc6-i386
   git clone https://github.com/radxa/rock-bsp.git
   cd rock-bsp

Use the rootfs we build

   echo "BOARD_ROOTFS=${IMAGE}" >> rock-bsp/configs/${BOARD}_config
   cd rock-bsp
   ./config.sh  $BOARD
   make

If everything goes well, we will have the Rabian image for $BOARD.