Upgrading SheevaPlug Ubuntu 9.04

[manscher]

Apparently, Ubuntu 9.04 has gone end-of-life, as has 9.10

http://www.ubuntucommand.com/ubuntu-9-10-end-of-life/

It seems to me that I am stuck with Ubuntu 9.04, for which there are no security upgrades. Can anyone help? I have my /home on a separate partition, so it should be relatively safe to do even an overwrite, but how can I do that in a command line interface?

[NewIT_Marcus]

You can migrate to Debian, but if you're booting from NAND (and want to put your new O/S on NAND), I don't know of anyone that has changed O/S without rewriting the entire NAND (and converting to UBIFS). ie you will have to backup your data, then restore it, rather than leave it in situ.

Here's the most well known guide for putting Debian onto a Sheevaplug: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html

[manscher]

Are you saying that the SheevaPlug can't run e.g. ubuntu 10.04 lucid?

[NewIT_Marcus]

Are you saying that the SheevaPlug can't run e.g. ubuntu 10.04 lucid?

See Getting Started with the Sheevaplug; there is a link on that page to the Plug computer forum New Plugger How To page, and on that page:

CAUTION! You should not dist-upgrade to any Ubuntu release newer than Jaunty (as long as the ARM processor is not supported by them).

Ubuntu do not support the ARM processor since 9.05. (the ARM version of Jaunty is 9.05, not 9.04, presumably because of extra time taken to prepare ARM binaries)

[manscher]

Thanks for this. This means that my SheevaPlug is probably bricked now (not your fault; I tried the lucid and only later found out that someone had tried that with very bad results). I need to find out how to get it back to life; can I just download an SD image and boot from that? The plug was bought march 2010, which means it's a regular multiboot SheevaPlug, right?

---

ADDED:
- SD card installation is trashed (lucid code not working). Lots of "Invalid instruction" (or something similar)
- Can boot to NAND by removing SD card
- Can mount SD card (/dev/mmcblk0p1, /dev/mmcblk0p2) and USB harddisk to copy files from SD card if necessary
- Wrote new SD card with Debian squeeze using the excellent instructions from here: https://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1879.0.html, using image fitting my SD card from here: http://www.newit.co.uk/drive-images/Sheevaplug/white-plug/. Used ultima-8G-8017412096-NewIT-v1.1-debian-squeeze.img.gz, complained about not being able to write the last block with ultima-8G-NewIT-v1.1-debian-squeeze.img.gz

[NewIT_Marcus]

Thanks for this. This means that my SheevaPlug is probably bricked now (not your fault; I tried the lucid and only later found out that someone had tried that with very bad results). I need to find out how to get it back to life; can I just download an SD image and boot from that? The plug was bought march 2010, which means it's a regular multiboot SheevaPlug, right?

Depends if you bought regular or multiboot. If you're not sure, the only way to verify is to look at your environment variables. If recover1, recover2, recover3 & recover4 exist, it's multiboot.

ADDED:
- SD card installation is trashed (lucid code not working). Lots of "Invalid instruction" (or something similar)

If your SD card has lucid on it in some shape or form, forget about it. Your best bet is to either copy a full (Jaunty or Debian) SD card image, or to manually partition & place your own rootfs on it.

- Can boot to NAND by removing SD card

So it's probably multiboot.

- Can mount SD card (/dev/mmcblk0p1, /dev/mmcblk0p2) and USB harddisk to copy files from SD card if necessary
- Wrote new SD card with Debian squeeze using the excellent instructions from here: https://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1879.0.html, using image fitting my SD card from here: http://www.newit.co.uk/drive-images/Sheevaplug/white-plug/. Used ultima-8G-8017412096-NewIT-v1.1-debian-squeeze.img.gz, complained about not being able to write the last block with ultima-8G-NewIT-v1.1-debian-squeeze.img.gz

So the image you tried to copy was larger than your SD card. You would be better off using a smaller image, then resize2fs whilst the SD card is not yet mounted.

[darryl]

You can modify the /etc/apt/sources.list file to keep using online repositories.

However, it must be understood that Ubuntu 9.04 is end of life and wholly unsupported.

So, to keep being able to use apt just modify /etc/apt/sources.list as follows:

Code:

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty-security main restricted universe multiverse

Then run:

Code:

apt-get update

And carry on using your sheevaplug as before.
Remember this is unsupported software, there are no security updates!