Sheevaplug installer - alpha-6 release - Testers needed

[Billy]

My problem is solved. The point was "grep: installer/uboot-custom.txt: No such file or directory" .
(Due to the help of  user fragfutter I was able to find out, that this file was missing in my installer directory)
I don't know why.
After downloading and installing with a new sheevaplug-installer-alpha-6.tar.gz th plug is running now.

[Reedy]

Worked well for me

[Manic]

Ok... after a whole day wasted mucking around im finally admitting defeat.. let me tell you my odyssey:

As I would like the ability to boot from SD card, among a few other things, I choose the installer option. Got  a new USB stick, formated it in FAT32 (in Windows), and moved the contents of the installer dir (from my ubuntu laptop) to the root of the drive.

Foolishly enough, I did not have a serial connection open to actually see what was happening on the plug - major mistake :/

I started the runme.sh from my ubuntu machine, and everything a-ok, after a bit it went to the point where it tells me to switch to serial. After a few unsuccesful tries I went in, only to see an Ubuntu login (instead of the original Debian) and the following info:

Code:

Ubuntu 9.04 ubuntu ttyS0

Linux ubuntu 2.60.30-rc6 \2 PREEMPT Wed May 20 05:42:04 MDT 2009 arm5tel

Ah I say, its done it, brilliant. Unfortunately  though I was wrong, as it appears to have done a botched upgrade: nano doesnt exist anymore, vi doesnt work, apt-get doesnt do anything, I cant SSH anymore to the plug and various other weird behaviour.
Also, when restarted, the serial shows a LOT of errors of

Code:

modprobe: FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.30-rc6/modules.dep: No such file or directory

I seem to get more errors a bit after the Marvel logo but I dont know how to get a printout of them - anybody to help a n00b in linux logging?

Also after the flashing, the usb drive appears to have been corrupted, requiring a re-formating.

Ive tried the whole process from scratch, formating the drive (FAT32), partitioning it, recopying the installer files (by first uncompressing them again from the archive), but when I run the runme.sh I get the following:

Code:

**** Preparing environment variables file ...
grep: scripts-linux/uboot-env/uboot-dflt.txt: No such file or directory
grep: installer/uboot-custom.txt: No such file or directory
****  Burning uboot and environment variables ... This will take a few minutes ...
/home/manic/Desktop/sheevaplug-installer-alpha-6/runme.sh: line 18: cd: uboot: Not a directory
/home/manic/Desktop/sheevaplug-installer-alpha-6/runme.sh: line  19: ../scripts-linux/openocd/openocd: No such file or directory

**** openocd FAILED
**** Is the mini USB cable connected?
**** Try powering down, then replugging the Sheevaplug

Note the command is executed under sudo. Ive checked the vendor ID change and it does not apply here, although I have tried it; The files that grep cant find are definetly there, and not corrupt;

I am going crazy over this, and VERY tempted to just start again with my spare plug (I have 3 supplied by my university for my project) but I would prefer to make this one operational again. If anyone can give any help whatsoever Ill be grateful 

[fragfutter]

runme.sh expects you to be in the directory where runme.sh is.

sudo ./runme.sh

and if it fails you can walk through it step by step. Its a bash script.

[Manic]

wow well I feel like an idiot.. seems to have worked fine now. The weird thing is that it does work the first time when run from another location.. aw well. Cheers anw!

[badcam]

Initially I had the "Bad Magic Number" issue like some others. Several USB sticks later, everything seems to have mostly worked. The reflashing seems to hae taken but when it starts the reboot process it gets stuck here:

* Starting kernel log daemon...
Ubuntu 9.04 ubuntu ttyS0

ubuntu login:                                                            [ OK ]
                                                                                * Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server sshd                              [ OK ]
                                                                                * Starting periodic command scheduler crond                              [ OK ]
                                                                                * Restarting OpenBSD Secure Shell server sshd

Hitting enter brings up the login & password request, which work. An "ls" command shows nothing in root. A "df" gives me this:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                   256904         0    256904   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                  256904        36    256868   1% /var/run
varlock                 256904         0    256904   0% /var/lock
udev                    256904       112    256792   1% /dev
tmpfs                   256904         0    256904   0% /dev/shm
rootfs                  472732    184784    283112  40% /

What other information can I provide that will assist me in making sure everything has been reflashed correctly? Thanks.

[badcam]

Here's some more info that may help:

The IP address is set to 192.168.1.9 when it should be 192.168.1.8 as the Router serves IP addresses based on the MAC address. This hasn't happened. I did change the "uboot-custom.txt" file to set the MAC address, and that's the ONLY change I've made apart from just following the instructions presented at the beginning of this thread.

[Edit] The MAC address is different:

It should be 00:50:43:01:D5:8F  and the IP   192.168.1.8 but it's showing as

                    00:50:43:4E:2A:14                     192.168.1.9

I note that the original MAC address in the uboot custom file was: 00:62:81:a0:00:00

[fragfutter]

What other information can I provide that will assist me in making sure everything has been reflashed correctly? Thanks.

Looks fine. Your rootfs is on the internal nand. if you want you can check kernel version (uname -a) and see if it 2.6.30* the original plug has 2.6.22 (if i remember this correct).

Booting is also correct. The login in the terminal is ready before the last service started so you have additional kernel output after it printed te prompt. hitting enter again simply reprints the login prompt

i assume by ls in root you mean logging in as root and then typing ls. an ls of the filesystem root should show you folders (ls /)

[fragfutter]

The IP address is set to 192.168.1.9 when it should be 192.168.1.8 as the Router serves IP addresses based on the MAC address. This hasn't happened. I did change the "uboot-custom.txt" file to set the MAC address, and that's the ONLY change I've made apart from just following the instructions presented at the beginning of this thread.

The "original" mac address in the uboot-custom.txt is only a sample. It won't hurt to use it (if there is only one plug in the network) but using the mac of your plug which is guranteed to be unique is better.

The ethernet hardware of the plug will read it's mac address from an uboot environment variable. You can check what mac is there. It should be the one you see in the running linux system.

In the running linux system you can get the mac of your interface with ifconfig eth0

[badcam]

Thanks fragfutter.

uname -a tells me that I do indeed have 2.6.30-rc6. Sweeeeeeeet!

If I connect using puTTy via SSH and not serial I get the following  typing "ls" and then ifconfig eth0:

root@ubuntu:~# ls
root@ubuntu:~# ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:43:4e:2a:14
          inet addr:192.168.1.9  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::250:43ff:fe4e:2a14/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:9944 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:6647 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:14722038 (14.7 MB)  TX bytes:470401 (470.4 KB)
          Interrupt:11

root@ubuntu:~#

The MAC address printed on the Sheevaplug is 00:50:43:01:D5:8F and this is what I put in the uboot-
custom.txt file. I have also put this MAC address in my router and the assigned IP address should be 192.168.1.8 As you can see, the MAC and assigned IP are different. Also, there isn't any file or directory showing in root. I recall that there was a directory with the original flashed OS. It began with D, I recall.

What do you think?

[badcam]

I found this thread which gave me a solution to changing the MAC address:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=94891

I used TmP's idea to add the following to /etc/network/interfaces:

iface eth0 inet dhcp
hwaddress ether 00:a0:WH:AT:EV:ER
auto eth0

My interfaces file now looks like this:

# Used by ifup( and ifdown(. See the interfaces(5) manpage or        <<<==???Smileys (ignore)
# /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

# Added these lines to ensure MAC Address is as per Sheevaplug label
hwaddress ether 00:50:43:01:D5:8F
auto eth0

and of course, whenever I reboot I get the correct MAC address.

ifconfig now shows:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:43:01:d5:8f
          inet addr:192.168.1.8  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::250:43ff:fe01:d58f/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:15 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:1430 (1.4 KB)  TX bytes:1424 (1.4 KB)
          Interrupt:11

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

I assume that this looks OK?

What I would like to know though, is where did the false MAC address of 00:50:43:4E:2A:14 come from?

[elBradford]

I've been having consistent problems with my install using the alpha-6 installer. Using the rootfs found in the installer archive, it installs OK but with LOTS of

Warn : keep_alive() was not invoked in the 100ms timelimit.

errors. When it's done, I get the correct prompt, however apt-get and other binaries are not available. I've reformatted the flash drive, I've re-extracted the archive, same results. When I used a newer kernel found on with-linux, I had init errors that I haven't written down.

Does anyone know what is up? This is getting very frustrating - when I use the USB recovery, my nand has bad CRC errors after about 2 reboots, so I'm trying to boot entirely off SD.

Bradford

[Rabeeh Khoury]

can you try using different miniusb cable?

[elBradford]

can you try using different miniusb cable?

Thanks.

I tried again with a different cable, the same problem - missing binaries and tons of keep_alive() errors.

After logging in, these lines appear, showing that most binaries are missing:

-bash: groups: command not found
-bash: dircolors: command not found
-bash: mesg: command not found

My setup is this: I am running Ubungu 8.04 Server in the VMPlayer application. I connect the serial cable to my computer, and route it to the virtual machine. The vm does everything over the serial connection as I would expect it, so it seems to be working (but not well obviously). Is there something wrong in using the installer from a VM?

Bradford

[mgillespie]

I've never had much luck with timing critical serial and USB comms in a virtual machine..   Have you tried using a Ubuntu boot CD?   Or even better installing Ubuntu using Wubi  (Ubuntu on Windows, does not need partitioning)