Moving from NSLU2 to the Plug?

[feffer]

fwiw: called GT today, to ask about the status of my order (1-std SheevaPlug, 1-GuruPlug+, 1-GuruPlug JTAG). They said my order should be shipping in the next few days. So presumably the GuruPlugs are in Southern CA now and should show up for other soon as well. Anyway, that's what they said...

@ peter: OK, you were able to clone your OS to various devices to see what you liked better -- that's good to know. Means I can be flexible. Try it one way, but not necessarily lose much if I decided to try another. One less worry.

@ fragfutter: Good point about installing to an SD card so the external hdd could spin down. I had a hard time with this using the NSLU2. Had to fiddle a lot with services, as you say. It doesn't seem like the kit comes with an SD card. Are any better than others? I.E. should I use a class 4 or higher card for faster writes etc? Is SD flash like USB flash sticks in that logs should be held in RAM etc, or is that not a problem?

feffer

[peter a]

New it did some testing of SD cards :- http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,50.0.html

I just pulled the SD card out of my camera , which is a class 6

[Blüto]

I think the reigning speed champion is the Class 10 Sandisk Extreme 30 MB/s. I've seen them for better than half off the MSRP (people buy them at retail, redeem the UPC for a rebate, and resell them on eBay and Amazon among other places), but they're still expensive at half the price!

For maximum flexibility I'd buy a Class 8 MicroSD with an SDHC  adapter so I could use the same card in either plug.

[feffer]

OK, thx for addressing all these issues, and sorry for adding one more. Last question here...really 

On Martin Michlmayr's page, he describes downloading the debian "installer" but actually provides links to uImage and uInitrd. Am I right in assuming the "installer" is integral to those two files and running the commands Martin provides will install a full Debian system and kernel? Or is there some other "debian installer" package that is being referred to?

Also once Debian Squeeze is installed, what are the apt sources I need for additional packages. Just the standard debian testing ones or are there other ones specifically useful for the Plug?

hmmm, that was two questions  but they were related...right?

thx,
feffer

[peter a]

I didn`t use this method, I used the decompress the root tar ball 

I think that method is like giving you a Boot Floppy , uImage and uInitrd just starts it off, somewhere it`s got the find the root tar ball to decompress or download.

[cjm]

@Peter: The gunzip command has two "modes" of operation: file-based (when you give it a filename) or stdin/stdout (no filename). If you pass a filename, it expects it to have a .gz extension. That's why I redirected the input, i.e. gunzip won't see a file name and simply read from stdin:


/tmp/initrd_test# gunzip </boot/uInitrd | cpio -id


That's more or less the same as


/tmp/initrd_test# cat /boot/uInitrd | gunzip | cpio -id

[cjm]

Just realized you used uInitrd. That's not a plain ramdisk file, it contains headers for u-boot. Do you have a plain ramdisk file as well? It's usually called initrd.img-<version>

[peter a]

My boot list :-

config-2.6.30-2-kirkwood
config-2.6.32-2-kirkwood
initrd.img
initrd.img-2.6.30-2-kirkwood
initrd.img-2.6.32-2-kirkwood
initrd.img.old
lost+found
sheeva-2.6.32.8-uImage
System.map
System.map-2.6.30-2-kirkwood
System.map-2.6.32-2-kirkwood
System.map-2.6.33-2-kirkwood
uImage
uImage_ok
uInitrd
vmlinuz
vmlinuz-2.6.30-2-kirkwood
vmlinuz-2.6.32-2-kirkwood
vmlinuz.old

[Blüto]

On Martin Michlmayr's page, he describes downloading the debian "installer" but actually provides links to uImage and uInitrd. Am I right in assuming the "installer" is integral to those two files and running the commands Martin provides will install a full Debian system and kernel? Or is there some other "debian installer" package that is being referred to?

I know nothing about Debian per se, but uImage is a kernel and uInitrd is a RAMdisk image which very likely contains fundamental utilities ([c]fdisk, mkfs* dhcpcd, etc.) and a text-mode installation program that will automate the setup process, perhaps one that resembles this.

I expect you'll put the images on your Slug (or whatever), TFTP them to the plug to boot, connect through the serial terminal and launch the installer.