Installing Zeroshell on the Alix board

Finally I’ve got some time to play around with the installation of Zeroshell on the alix2d3 board.
The installation requires just a few steps and it’s quite easy.

In the download section of the Zeroshell website is already available an image for a 1Gb Compact Flash card:
all you need to do is get it, decompress it and copy it to your CF card with dd.

My CF card gets recognized as device /dev/sdd, so I’ve issued the following commands:

root@wombat:tmp# gunzip ZeroShell-1.0.beta11-ALIX-CompactFlash-1GB.img.gz
root@wombat:tmp# dd if=ZeroShell-1.0.beta11-ALIX-CompactFlash-1GB.img of=/dev/sdd

… in a bunch of minutes the card is ready to be used

1981728+0 records in
1981728+0 records out
1014644736 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 292.128 s, 3.5 MB/s

Note that copying the image should create 3 new partitions on the card

root@wombat:tmp# fdisk -l /dev/sdd

Disk /dev/sdd: 1039 MB, 1039933440 bytes
32 heads, 61 sectors/track, 1040 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1952 * 512 = 999424 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x59eb2af7

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 14 13633+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdd2 15 175 157136 83 Linux
/dev/sdd3 176 1015 819840 83 Linux

And that’s all for the installation …

Insert the card, connect the serial console with minicom, power the board and you should see Zeroshell booting

Once the system has completely started up you will be able to configure it using the console or the web interface.