Trying to get back to square 1

[Brandt]

I bought my sheevaplug off eBay, therefore I don't really have a company to support it. I have followed so many tutorials on the web with my sheevaplug and I have found the methods of NewIT to be the best supported methods. Although I am in the US, I would like to follow these methods.

- When I originally got my sheevaplug it was at u-boot 3.4.16 with Ubuntu 9.04. As of right now, it won't even boot off the NAND, I get a bad magic number error. I had previously had a successful 'Debian install to flash' with the UBIFS and minimal writes to flash. Then I had tried to connect to the serial interface and was getting jibberish so I over-reacted and re-ran the Ubuntu sheevaplug installer. I have found since then that 'cu' works way better than 'screen' or 'putty' ( I am using Xubuntu 9.04 on a Parallels VM on my macbook pro ).

- I also just replaced my SD card socket, as I must have bent the pins or something the socket was shot. I am now trying to install Debian squeeze to the SD card following Martin's tutorial. I have a SanDisk 8GB Class 2 card I bought, and it seems to get stuck at 83% on the base install. I don't know if it is because the card is too slow or what. Is there a way to run the installer straight from my Linux PC so I only need to plug the SD card into the sheevaplug to boot?


I am trying to decide between two setups that I would eventually like to have running:

1. The NewIT multiboot setup primarily booting off debian on the SD card.

or

2. Debian squeeze installed on the NAND with minimal flash writes on UBIFS having the SD card contain certain partitions that are used when installing apps with apt-get like /usr, /var, and /etc



I am still new to sheevaplugs, only two weeks in so far. I am however a Solaris Unix Sys Admin by trade, and have some experience with Linux.

I would appreciate any links to walk-throughs detailing the process NewIT goes through when setting up a sheevaplug for multiboot and installing debian on an SD card (both u-boot environment variables, and installs)

I am still combing through the forum as I just signed up so I may come across these in my search.

My use for a sheevaplug is as a Home Automation server using Heyu, Flite/Festival, Julius/Pocketsphinx, lighttpd, php5, and mysql.

Thanks,
Brandt

[NewIT_Marcus]

Martins procedure (and in particular the way he partitions the SD card and hence boot parameters) differs from what we use. Our method is the same as the installer option to install to SD card.

Our SD cards have 2 partitions; the kernel is on the first (ext2) and the rootfs is on the second (ext3).

Since you probably don't care about the current contents of NAND, you should learn how to use the installer to write debian to NAND. It's the same as the original Ubuntu procedure, but with a Debian rootfs instead of an Ubuntu rootfs.

But before you do that you should be able to download an SD card image and set up our multiboot environment variables. Then you can at least test your plug.

In the light of this:

Then I had tried to connect to the serial interface and was getting jibberish

You also need to identify your plug model; is it an A1 cpu?

[Brandt]

Thanks for the link to your images! I assume I just gunzip them into the root of the SD card? no ISO images or anything?

In the light of this:

Then I had tried to connect to the serial interface and was getting jibberish

You also need to identify your plug model; is it an A1 cpu?

I see 0301B on the back, so I assume it is an A1 cpu?

Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)
Marvell SheevaPlug Reference Board

[NewIT_Marcus]

Thanks for the link to your images! I assume I just gunzip them into the root of the SD card? no ISO images or anything?

Use dd to copy the image to the SD card device (not partition).

Code:

dd if=/path/to/image-file of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=10M

In the light of this:

Then I had tried to connect to the serial interface and was getting jibberish

You also need to identify your plug model; is it an A1 cpu?

I see 0301B on the back, so I assume it is an A1 cpu?

Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)
Marvell SheevaPlug Reference Board

The 0301B is the only visible external difference.

[Brandt]

Use dd to copy the image to the SD card device (not partition).

Code:

dd if=/path/to/image-file of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=10M

So I gunzip onto my Linux VM, and then dd onto the SDHC card?

[Brandt]

Since you probably don't care about the current contents of NAND, you should learn how to use the installer to write debian to NAND. It's the same as the original Ubuntu procedure, but with a Debian rootfs instead of an Ubuntu rootfs.

Do you have a link to that guide?

[Brandt]

Do you still recommend u-boot 3.4.23 or what? I am on 3.4.19

[NewIT_Marcus]

Since you probably don't care about the current contents of NAND, you should learn how to use the installer to write debian to NAND. It's the same as the original Ubuntu procedure, but with a Debian rootfs instead of an Ubuntu rootfs.

Do you have a link to that guide?

http://www.plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/SheevaPlug_Installer
http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=717.0
http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=1400.0

[NewIT_Marcus]

Use dd to copy the image to the SD card device (not partition).

Code:

dd if=/path/to/image-file of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=10M

So I gunzip onto my Linux VM, and then dd onto the SDHC card?

It depends what PC you have available for writing to the SD card. If the PC has a built-in SD card (and is running linux), it probably appears as /dev/mmcblk0. If you are running Windows, there is software for writing images. Google should be able to help.

[NewIT_Marcus]

Do you still recommend u-boot 3.4.23 or what? I am on 3.4.19

Yes, we recommend 3.4.23.

[Brandt]

Great I upgraded to 3.4.23 last night. I dd'd the image to /dev/sdb and it worked! I set the mutiboot env vars now I'm up and running on the sd card! Now I just need to peruse those installer links to install to NAND. Thanks a lot!

[NewIT_Marcus]

Great I upgraded to 3.4.23 last night. I dd'd the image to /dev/sdb and it worked! I set the mutiboot env vars now I'm up and running on the sd card! Now I just need to peruse those installer links to install to NAND. Thanks a lot!

Unless you use the same (or similar) environment variables as you have now, you'll lose your ability to boot from SD card when you use the installer to rewrite your NAND. You can manually reset them, or use the file that I'll attach to this post instead of the installer version (don't forget to set the MAC address to that of your plug). This won't make complete sense right now, but when you look into the installer process it should become clearer.

There are lots of different ways of booting a Sheevaplug, and you'll almost certainly break your current system before you get the NAND working. So make sure you keep a safety copy of your current environment variables.

Your A1 plug does need some special handling; see the thread I referred to previously. If you get to the stage of having seemingly rewritten NAND successfully, but not successfully booting, then we may need to talk about arcNumber and kernel versions.