I have a couple of cards I can try. I decided to go with debian on the plug. The notes about ext4 on Ubuntu told be the more supported direction might be debian. I will try your tips on using Linux to prepart/mkfs the sd card. Might be that what caused the 1st problem.
That said, I think it is time to bring it back inside the local network and start ;-]
On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 04:38, Frank Horowitz
<frank@horow.net> wrote:
Hi All,
First of all, thanks to Martin for the instructions on getting this going at <http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html> (as well as the work behind the instructions, obviously)!
This is just a quick note to say that I ran into a few issues when following those directions, and includes some workarounds that I found...
Problem number one: when trying to use "screen" from a Mac OSX laptop to drive the installer, even though it works perfectly well for displaying the U-Boot stuff, and the initial booting messages, once the installation process gets into the curses based tty prompting stuff, the characters become unreadable (looking like old tty graphics characters, for those of you old enough to remember those). After mucking around with serial line settings and fonts etc., I eventually gave up and used a linux box and its screen implementation. That worked reasonably well, modulo a few messages at USB bus scanning time that garbaged up the curses display. All in all, the installation (eventually, see below) succeeded via this workaround.
Problem number two: I first tried to install to an SDHC (8GB) card in the slot. After appearing to install OK, the reboot from U-Boot failed with a CRC error (I forget whether it was on uInitrd or uImage.) Suspecting a flakey SD card, I chose the route of using a USB flash drive, mostly because I don't have another SDHC flash card reader floating around with which to test things. In running the installer this second time, it appeared to install OK on the USB flash drive (partitioned into a single ext3 partition using the built-in partitioner of the installer). However, U-Boot (suitably changed for the new device, according to the instructions on Martin's website) also failed with CRC errors. This time, I simply stuck the USB flash drive into my (i386) Linux box and examined the situation. The flash drive partition *was not recognized as an ext2/ext3 filesystem* and fsck.ext3 could not cure it. My simple workaround, I repartitioned (this time into a small partition for /boot and the rest of the drive for /) on the i386 Linux box, and also ran mkfs.ext3 from there. Stashing the uInitrd and uImage files on the first (/boot) partition of the USB flash drive, I then re-tried the installation a third time. This time it worked, but I deliberately told the installer not to repartition the drive or to reformat the filesystems, but to use them as-is from the i386 setup.
I now have a Debian/testing setup on my sheevaplug!
I notice that Sid has kernel 2.6.32.xx already built for the kirkwood. I actually need a kernel version later than 2.6.30.xx since the driver for my wireless USB stick (RTL8187 based) now claims to support Master mode. Any hints on getting the plug to load and boot into that kernel? (I tried the obvious thing of wget-ing the linux-image deb, and using dpkg to install it, but that booted into the older 2.6.30.xx kernel.)
Thanks again for the useful instructions!
Cheers,
Frank Horowitz
frank@horow.net
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