Frank, 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.
--steve 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 <[email protected]> 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 > [email protected] > > > > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > [email protected] > > -- steve pirk refiamerica.org "father... the sleeper has awakened..." paul atreides - dune kexp.org member august '09
