@c4c OK, Firstly I’ve detected you are a bit more advanced since what you have done so far. If you are not familiar with linux then don’t follow these directions since there will be holes and its not a complete step by step only a direction of the path you need to walk.
first let me say my buildroot environment is setup differently than the way the dev’s setup their buildroot environment. Mine’s different because I build other embedded OS images outside of FOG.
First you will need a linux computer to build the buildroot environment. Use current release of debian [10 or 11] or ubuntu 20.04 and install the build essentials package.
For FOG 1.5.9 use this version of buildroot: https://buildroot.org/downloads/buildroot-2020.02.tar.gz
Expand that tarball out to a working directory (i.e. ~/work). In the same working directory ~/work clone the FOS Linux repository on github. git clone https://github.com/FOGProject/fos
That will create a fos directory (~/work/fos).
Copy ~/work/fos/Buildroot
~/work/buildroot-2020.02
edit ~/work/buildroot-2020.02/packages/Config.in
add in the section from ``~/work/buildroot-2020.02/packages/newConfig.in` into near the bottom of the Config.in. This will add in the FOG package options into the buildroot menus.
Lastly you need to copy over the fog settings for buildroot into your buildroot tree.
Copy ~/work/fos/configs/fsx64.config
to ~/work/buildroot-2020.02/.config
(yes the hidden config file that starts with a dot).
Once you have everything in place from the buildroot base directory (~/work/buildroot-2020.02) key in make nconfig
(you might get an error about missing libraries here, go back and load them then run it again).
You should now be in the buildroot configuration menu. I want you to check to see if the FOG package menus are listed and they are checked. This will confirm you have setup everything needed correctly. I know this is a lot of manual setup work, but in the end it will allow you to start at the same point FOS linux is for 1.5.9.
The FOG added in menus will appear as this:
Save the settings in the buildroot menu configuration and exit.
Now key in make -j4
and that will start the process. If you have more than 4 processors you can increase the number of threads to use to decrease the build time. The first time through it may take 1hr to build the init.xz file. This is because its building all of the programs needed to build the init.xz file. On the second run it will be much faster since its only building the programs needed to build the init.xz file.
Once the init.xz file is complete move it to the FOG server as init_test.xz (to not mess up the fog provided init.xz file). Now for your test target computer, go into the host management page for this specific computer and insert init_test.xz into the initrd field for this computer, save it. Now pxe boot the target computer, pick like hardware verification, watch the screen quickly as it will transfer bzImage and then init_test.xz to the test computer. If it does transfer init_test.xz then you have FOG configured correctly.
This first run don’t change any settings from what the FOG developers have provided. You want to test to make sure you can successfully build the init.xz file. From that basis then you can make changes to the configuration using the make nconfig
command. If you need to include files or stuff into the init.xz file you can add them to the ~/work/buildroot-2020.02/board/FOG/FOS/rootfs_overlay
directory structure. These files get copied into the init.xz file as its being created. Any tweaks you did by unpacking the init.xz file can be inserted here.
I know this is A LOT of information, because buildroot IS very complex. BUT you can modify the buildroot packages to include to give you the exact initrd you need.