Sheevaplug installer - alpha-6 release - Testers needed

[Rabeeh Khoury]

This is second round of the installer, version alpha-6

Please refer to the wiki page about it -

http://www.plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/SheevaPlug_Installer

Also please provide feedbacks on the missing features, what needs to be enhanced etc...

Fixes from the previous version - (version alpha-5) -
1. Wrong mount of /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 in the initrd (problem appears only when using USB stick formatted under Linux).
2. Added 'feroceon.cpu arp_examine' to openocd which re-examines the target again after nSRST.
3. Rebuilt ubuntu 9.04 rootfs from latest deb packages.
4. Removed /debootstrap directory after install
5. Added empty '/etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules' that forbids udev from changing eth0 to eth1 when the user changes the mac address in u-boot.
6. Changed loading kernel from 2MB to 8MB in u-boot scripts.


Previous version was at -
http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=323.msg1831#msg1831


Enjoy,
Rabeeh

[mymaestro]

This is second round of the installer, version alpha-6

Please refer to the wiki page about it -

http://www.plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/SheevaPlug_Installer

Works great! The README.txt is not so clear about how to make the USB key, but the wiki page makes more sense. I am getting an error from the installed kernel during boot:
 * Setting kernel variables (/etc/sysctl.d/10-network-security.conf)...         error: "net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies" is an unknown key
 [fail]

Now, how do I change the environment to boot from the SD card? None of the wiki instructions work with this new environment.
Thanks for the great work!

[burn]

If someone already has a working uboot can we just use the installer usb stick portion of this?  the current openocd doesn't run on os x.

[burn]

If someone already has a working uboot can we just use the installer usb stick portion of this?  the current openocd doesn't run on os x.

I used an iso of ubuntu that allows booting without modifying the host system, and that ran the installer just fine.  For those that don't want to try to port openocd to OSX this is a good option for them.  Thanks for putting this together, and I hope the community picks this up for possible future releases.  It would be great to get a new distro, kernel and uboot packaged up nicely in this installer from time to time.  When/ if it gets to GUI stage, it would be nice to be able ot select different parts; i.e. Flash uboot? Flash Kernel?  Flash Distro?

To recap how I made it work (and this would work for any system; WIndows, OSX, linux etc.
1.  Download latest Ubuntu Desktop install: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
2.  Burn .iso
3.  Boot from CD
4.  Download Sheevaplug installer
5.  Untar
6.  (Optional) Edit uboot-custom.txt <-- especially MAC address
7.  sudo ./runme

[ianjb]

Hi,

Noobie here.

I have a pogoplug. I do not want to overwrite the NAND until I am more familiar with this device. So what I would like to do is create a bootable USB from the Sheevaplug installer - alpha-6. Once I have the correct files on a USB stick, I can set up uboot simlilar to http://www.openplug.org/plugwiki/index.php/Multi-Boot. Any help on this would be much appreciated.
Ian

[Rabeeh Khoury]

The installer is intended for Sheevaplug and not pogo plug.
I have no idea what happens if you try it on pogo plug.

[burn]

Perfect!   On my sheeva that I had successfully used this on already needed some fixing up, I just popped the usb in again and ran 'run recover1' and it wiped it back again.  Now I need to try not to fill the NAND again.  I am also trying to get this install to SD boot, and can't seem to get the bootcmds right.

[Rabeeh Khoury]

For booting from SD you need to modify bootargs_root from the NAND thing (UBIFS etc...) to much more simpler -

Code:

bootargs_root root=/dev/mmcblk0p1

Which means boot from first partition (p1).

Note that you must make sure that the root filesystem type in the command (ubifs) is removed.

[ianjb]

I've been looking at the scripts of the installer and openOCD. I see that the installer uses openOCD to write images to the NAND in the plug. I also see that openOCD has the ability to read NAND and save it as a file.

I think a new utility that reads nand images to a file would be a very useful addition to the toolbox. This could provide a backup of the plug as received and would enable the device to be restored to its' "as delivered" state. This would be an excellent safety net for those of us looking to learn by our mistakes!

I could probably eventually make this utility but maybe someone (Rabeeh?) could do it a lot quicker than me.

Thoughts?

[burn]

could provide a backup of the plug as received

Hrm... This utility will restore a plug to a 'clean' and working state, also one that has a few updates over the stock setting.  I would suggest that everyone who doesn't have much worth saving run this utility.  It sets up the original plug with an updated kernel, and a few tweaks to make it faster and solve a few of the FAQs.

[jhill]

Worked great for me, and saved my butt, I was getting CRC errors on the nand drive, and now I can boot it of SD.  Thanks, it's a great utility and is really easy to use.

[dattaway]

This install is good!  Makes a very nice complete system fast.  This is the best embedded device I have seen yet.

The only problem I had was following directions.  Must be my lack of sleep, but I was unclear at first that ./runme.sh was to be run on the installing computer and the install directory was the root of the USB drive to be installed on the Sheeva.

[jdonth]

I am trying to test your installer and am stuck.

I copied and tar'd the latest installer, copied the installer directory to the usb drive, connected the usb port, installed the FAT32 usb drive and ran the ./runme.sh file.

My result is in the code block below. The final message I get is " ****   U-boot should be up and running now. Open your console ..."

What is next? !!  How do I open my console?

I can not ssh into the plug. I installed putty on my server box but I can't run it (Gtk-warning). I installed minicon but don't know the serial port to use.

I hope this isn't a totally stupid question but right now I don't seem to have a running plug any longer and I need to at least get back to where I was before I tried this.

Thanks,
~Joe

Code:

Using username "root".
Linux ubuntu 2.6.27-11-server #1 SMP Thu Jan 29 20:19:41 UTC 2009 i686

The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

To access official Ubuntu documentation, please visit:
http://help.ubuntu.com/

  System information as of Tue Jun  9 14:00:01 CDT 2009

  System load:  0.0               Swap usage:  0%     Users logged in: 1
  Usage of /:   8.2% of 26.34GB   Temperature: 45 C
  Memory usage: 12%               Processes:   77

  Graph this data and manage this system at https://landscape.canonical.com/
Last login: Tue Jun  9 14:05:36 2009 from 192.168.1.94
root@ubuntu:~# cd alpha-6
root@ubuntu:~/alpha-6# ./runme.sh
 ****   Preparing environment variables file ...
 ****   Burning uboot and environment variables ... This will take few minutes ...
Open On-Chip Debugger 0.2.0-in-development (2009-05-17-10:32) svn:1800M


BUGS? Read http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/trunk/BUGS


$URL: http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/trunk/src/openocd.c $
2000 kHz
dcc downloads are enabled
Info : JTAG tap: feroceon.cpu tap/device found: 0x20a023d3 (Manufacturer: 0x1e9, Part: 0x0a02, Version: 0x2)
Info : JTAG Tap/device matched
Error: unknown EmbeddedICE version (comms ctrl: 0x00000018)
Warn : no telnet port specified, using default port 4444
Warn : no gdb port specified, using default port 3333
Warn : no tcl port specified, using default port 6666
target state: halted
target halted in ARM state due to debug-request, current mode: Supervisor
cpsr: 0x000000d3 pc: 0xffff0000
MMU: disabled, D-Cache: disabled, I-Cache: disabled
0 0 1 0: 00052078
NAND flash device 'NAND 512MiB 3,3V 8-bit' found
successfully erased blocks 5 to 6 on NAND flash device 'NAND 512MiB 3,3V 8-bit'
wrote file uboot-env.bin to NAND flash 0 up to offset 0x000c0000 in 19.872343s
target state: halted
target halted in ARM state due to debug-request, current mode: Supervisor
cpsr: 0x000000d3 pc: 0xffff0000
MMU: disabled, D-Cache: disabled, I-Cache: disabled
0 0 1 0: 00052078
NAND flash device 'NAND 512MiB 3,3V 8-bit' found
successfully erased blocks 0 to 4 on NAND flash device 'NAND 512MiB 3,3V 8-bit'
wrote file uboot.bin to NAND flash 0 up to offset 0x00073000 in 71.450851s
 ****   U-boot should be up and running now. Open your console ...
root@ubuntu:~/alpha-6#

[jdonth]

I'm not quite sure what happened but after about a five minute wait, I was able to ssh into the SheevaPlug.

I went back and did the whole install again - waited 5 minutes - and was able to connect to the plug.

So everything is working and it is fast!

Thank you for this great tool - an almost effortless install and a 2.6.30 kernel!

Thanks again,
~Joe

Any thoughts on why the delay from the final uboot message until the plug is "live"? Just curious.

[whosmatt]

It worked brilliantly for me.  I stumbled across it when i was looking for the files I needed to flash my plug back to the factory image (one file on my cd wouldn't untar) and I am glad I did... only problem so far is that my drobo won't mount (worked fine on the factory image) but I am trying formatting on the plug to see what happens.  edit:  it now mounts on the plug but not on my desktop.  the desktop sees the device but not the partition (even though I didn't create the partition on the plug, I just used mkfs.ext3 to format it)

anyway..

What's amazing to me (and maybe nobody else) is that i'm running windows in VMWare workstation on my Ubuntu desktop and so I ran the script in Ubuntu and puTTY in windows and both were able to access the plug simultaneously.

-m