[Technical tips] Making an X-Linux USB Bootable Drive to boot up VDX3-6754

A bootable USB drive is the best way to install or try Linux. In this tip, we will show how to make an X-Linux USB Bootable Drive.

What’s X-Linux?

We have some projects/products using embedded Linux and engineers make it as X-Linux. It is for our customers need embedded Linux to start their development. X-Linux is maintained and improved since 2002. Bugs are fixed and customers can use it as their Linux application without embedded Linux platform setup. Because it does not provide full documents and tool-chain, developers need to modify it manually.

X-Linux feature list:

• Can run on Vortex86SX/DX/MX series with 64M bytes memory.
• Only need 10M bytes storage space.
• Only need 10 seconds to boot on Vortex86SX/DX/MX series after POST.
• Support EXT2/EXT3 file system.
• Working with read-only file system (using tmpfs to reduce writing Flash storage).
• Support serial console for device without VGA.
• Include FTP, TELNET and WWW server.
• Support DHCP client.
• Support NFS.
• Support SSH.
• Support USB mass storage and USB keyboard/mouse.
• Support NTP client.

Operation Video

Making an X-Linux USB Bootable Drive

• Target Device: Vortex86 SBC – VDX3-6754
• Requires OS: Windows PC
• Steps:
  1. Use Rufus to make a FreeDOS bootable USB flash drive.
     (If you want to make a FreeDOS bootable USB, you can see Make the FreeDOS bootable USB flash drive.)
  2. Download X-Linux from: http://www.dmp.com.tw/tech/os-xlinux/xlinux-5.7-makebootfat-dx.zip.
  3. Uncompress the downloaded xlinux-5.7-makebootfat-dx.zip and copy all four files under image directory to the FreeDOS bootable USB flash drive.
  4. The USB flash drive should have the following files: bzimage, loadlin.exe, autoexec.bat and ramdisk.gz
     
  5. After above steps, your USB mass storage is FreeDOS bootable and has those files:

     File Name	Description
     bzimage	Linux kernel image.
     loadlin.exe	DOS tool to load Linux.
     autoexec.bat	DOS batch file to launch loadlin.exe with Linux kernel and RAM disk image after boot.
     ramdisk.gz	X-Linux RAM disk image.

  6. Boot up the Vortex86 SBC from the USB flash drive to X-Linux.
  7. The default username is root and the default password is password.
     

After above steps, you can successfully boot up the X-Linux on VDX3-6754.