I made a blog post about installing Debian on an Nspire CX: http://codinghobbit.no-ip.org/blog/?p=81

Would you be so kind as to edit that first post with the actual guide itself? I can't load your blog, and we frown on posts that are essentially single links.

I tried this, and it's really cool. Ivoah posted a video to his blog:


I tried it, and it was actually easier (and quicker) than I thought. I think it took me about 30 minutes from pulling out my USB drive and Nspire to my first boot. I have since erased my flash drive because I needed it for other things, and my USB adapter is really glitchy in that it sometimes loses connection. This results in kernel panics and stuff, not nice.

Anyway, I took 2 pictures.

Thanks for sharing those screenshots, aeTIos! I'm glad that the drivers now exist to make this both possible and simple, although it's unfortunate that you need to boot it from a Flash drive. Since I can't current check out the tutorial, is it possible to preinstall extra software into the image?

You can install extra software. You have to chroot to the flash drive while it's mounted on your computer, then apt-get install -d [packagename1],[packagename2]....etc. (for those who don't know: -d means "only download")
Then on the calc, once you boot, you can install your software using apt-get install [packagename1], ... etc. It's just like debian... because it is!
This also explains why it's not possible to install this on the calculator itself. Debian requires active Flash access, which IIRC linux does not have (at least not access to the calculator flash)

Or better:
* use an --include=X,Y,Z... argument to debootstrap;
* use chroot on the computer and install yet more software from there.
Rationale: full setup of a chroot with debootstrap requires installing qemu-user-static and binfmt-support and copying / linking qemu-arm-static to the chroot's /usr/bin.
With qemu-user-static and binfmt-support, computers become able to run native Debian Linux armel (and not just armel: qemu-user-static supports much more than this) binaries.

I've been using such workflows for building and maintaining chroots (used as base for cross-compilation using the Linaro cross-compilers, nowadays Debian unstable's pre-built cross-compilers do the job as well, as far as I could experiment) in my day job for more than two years and a half.

This step is included in the tutorial, so I assumed this. But indeed, you need to copy qemu to the flash drive to install stuff via chroot.

I didn't know about this; I'm still a Linux n00b I was just parroting what I learned from the tutorial.

As per request I have filmed bb running on the calculator: